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isidro lópez & emmanuel rodríguez

THE SPANISH MODEL

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rior to the debacle of 2008, Spain’s economy had been an object of particular admiration for Western commentators.1 To reproduce the colourful metaphors of the financial press, in the 1990s and early 2000s the Spanish bull performed much better than the moping lions of ‘Old Europe’. In the decade following 1995, 7 million jobs were created and the economy grew at a rate of nearly 4 per cent; between 1995 and 2007, the nominal wealth of households increased threefold. Spain’s historic specialization in sectors such as tourism and property development seemed perfectly suited to the age of globalization, which in turn seemed to smile on the country. Construction boomed as house prices soared, rising by 220 per cent between 1997 and 2007, while the housing stock expanded by 30 per cent, or 7 million units. All feeling of being merely the biggest country of the continent’s periphery was dispelled by a new image of modernity, which did not just catch up with but in some ways surpassed standard European expectations—at least when Spain’s dynamism was compared to the ‘rigidities’ of the Eurozone’s core. Add to this the 2004 return to power of the Socialist Party, under a youthful José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the effect of such quintessentially ‘modernizing’ laws as those on same-sex marriage, and the mixture acquired the bouquet of a young red wine: extremely robust on the palate.

In stark contrast, the financial crisis has given the country a completely different image of itself, with effects on Europe that remain to be calculated. Over the past year, Spain has on several occasions hovered on the brink of classification as a case for Eurozone bail-out, following Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Its construction industry, which in 2007 contributed nearly a tenth of the country’s gdp, has suffered a massive blow-out, leaving an over-build of unsold housing worse than Ireland’s, and the semi-public savings-and-loans sector waterlogged with debt. The effects of the housing-market collapse have reverberated throughout new left review 69 may jun 2011

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the economy: unemployment is running at over 20 per cent, and more than double that rate among the under-25s. A deep recession has been compounded by draconian austerity measures, supposedly aimed at reducing a deficit currently standing at over 10 per cent of gdp to 3 per cent by 2013. The political fall-out of the crisis is putting additional strain on Spain’s decentralized governmental structures, in which the seventeen Autonomous Communities administer a large proportion of public spending; in Catalonia and elsewhere, the ac budgets are also running deficits. The Spanish bull’s prostration also carries implications for the Eurozone as a whole. At over 45 million, the population of Spain is almost twice as large as those of Greece, Ireland and Portugal put together; its economy is the fourth largest in the Eurozone, with a gdp of $1,409bn, compared to $305bn for Greece, $204bn for Ireland and $229bn for Portugal. The scale of a Spanish bail-out, were Madrid to run into difficulty in financing its debts, would be likely to capsize the Eurozone’s current tactics for dealing with its indebted periphery— heavily conditional imf–ecb loans, so far made available to Greece, Ireland and Portugal with the aim of ‘tiding them over’, while safeguarding the exposed positions of big German, French and British banks. So far, the wager has been that, after a dose of austerity and labour-market reform, Spain’s pre-crisis economic model can be resuscitated in leaner, fitter form. Is this a viable proposition?

Phalangist architects The genealogy of the Spanish macro-economic model has been complex; one might even say, ironic. Its origins lie in the modernization programme of the Franco dictatorship from the late 1950s, premised on the development of mass-market tourism from northern Europe and the radical expansion of private home-ownership. This ‘solution’ to Spanish industry’s eternal competitive weakness was a notable anomaly in the context of the manufacturing growth that marked the post-war boom elsewhere in Europe. But as Franco’s Minister for Housing, the Phalangist José Luis Arrese, put it in 1957: Queremos un país de propietarios, no de proletarios—‘we want a country of proprietors, not proletarians’. This Thatcherism avant la lettre transformed the Spanish housing market: This article summarizes the main findings of the research and activist group, Madrid Metropolitan Observatory, published as Fin de ciclo. Financiarización, territorio y sociedad de propietarios en la onda larga del capitalismo hispano (1959–2010), Madrid 2010. The authors would like to thank Brian Anglo for his translation. 1

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Figure 1. Private home-ownership rates, Spain and England, 1960–2007 % 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 1950/53

1960/61

1970/71 Spain

1981

1991

2001

2007

England

Source: ine (National Institute of Statistics) and Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Infrastructures); and uk National Statistics.

during the 1950s, rented accommodation was still the norm; by 1970, private ownership accounted for over 60 per cent of housing, 10 points above the uk level (see Figure 1). The legacy of the Franco dictatorship and the enormous shortcoming of the country’s industrial structure did not augur well in a scenario characterized by increasing competition in international markets. The recessionary crisis beginning in 1973 was more severe in Spain than in most European countries, overlapping with the political transition that followed Franco’s death in 1975. But the advent of parliamentary democracy brought no change in macro-economic policy. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (psoe), in power continuously under Felipe González from 1982–96, had no alternative model to propose. Indeed, the strategy for relaunching the economy in the 1980s was based on deepening Spain’s existing ‘specializations’ in tourism, property development and construction, as ‘competitive advantages’ neatly adapted to

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the new approaches of the emerging global economy, i.e. high capital mobility and growing competition to capture financial incomes. This approach was effectively sanctioned by the other European powers in the negotiations that preceded Spain’s accession to the eec. In these pacts, which effectively constituted a strategic agenda for the country, the González government accepted its partial de-industrialization in exchange for extremely generous subsidies, which would account for an annual average of 1 per cent of Spain’s gdp between 1986 and 2004. As we shall see, these funds would play a key role in building the infrastructure— transport, energy, etc.—underlying the later construction boom, which consumed more than half the total subsidies. The run-up to integration into the European Community on 1 January 1986 saw a frenzy of investment, as European capital recognized the market opportunity opened up by the Iberian countries’ entry into the eec. German, French and Italian multinationals took up key positions within Spain’s production structure, buying up most of the big food-industry companies and the public-sector firms that were being privatized, taking over much of the supermarket sector and acquiring what remained of the major industrial companies. Only the banks, construction firms and the state-owned electricity and telecommunications monopolies remained immune to the buying frenzy for Spanish assets. The upshot of this wave of investment—which brought the first period of sustained growth since 1973—was a rapid overheating of the markets. The Madrid Stock Exchange saw increases of 200 per cent between 1986 and 1989, while the capital’s property market became one of the most profitable on the planet. In parallel with Reaganism in the us and Thatcherism in Britain, the economic cycle in Spain under González from 1985 to 1991 was the first attempt in continental Europe at growth by means of a financial and property asset-price bubble that would have a positive knock-on effect on domestic consumption and demand without any significant support from industrial expansion.2 The euphoria did not last long, however; the growing external deficit and the lack of a solid foundation for growth ended up unleashing speculative attacks against the Spanish peseta, whose value the government was pledged to maintain at any cost. A massive publicity campaign around the pomp and See José Manuel Naredo, La burbuja inmobiliario-financiera en la coyuntura económica reciente (1985–1995), Madrid 1996.

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ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Seville Universal Exhibition in 1992 proved unable to prevent the crash of the markets— followed, eventually, by a series of aggressive currency devaluations. By the early 1990s, the Spanish economy was once again faced with the problem of finding a path to growth.

Euro-boost Henceforward, however, Spanish macro-economic policy would be increasingly determined at European level, structured within the framework of the convergence criteria set for monetary union and the neoliberal doxa consolidated in the Maastricht Treaty and its successors, to which both psoe and pp governments gave their full support. The reduction of public spending, inflation-targeting and the deregulation of labour markets laid down by Maastricht enabled a recovery of financial profits, but generated new problems of stimulating demand in Europe’s rather slack economies. The pace of the Spanish economy’s post-95 recovery— accelerating from 1997 onwards to grow by an average 5 per cent per year between 1998 and 2000—cannot be explained, therefore, by the local implementation of neoliberal prescriptions. It lay rather in the capacity of the new rounds of property development and financial engineering to resolve, if only temporarily, a number of contradictions inherent in the chaotic articulation of the neoliberal recipes themselves. Four factors proved decisive here. First, low interest rates, as Maastricht and the control of public deficits—as well as the demands of the big financial companies, more interested in touting their new products (such as pension and investment funds) than in strengthening the positions of the typical creditors of the 1980s—led to a continual fall in the price of credit. Spain thus began a long journey that would take it from a position of boasting the highest interest rates in Europe to becoming the country with the highest levels of internal indebtedness on the Continent. Second, monetary union and definitive incorporation into the Eurozone in 1999–2002 guaranteed the Spanish economy an international umbrella, endowing it with strong purchasing capacity abroad and marginalizing the importance of its external deficit in the context of the European Union’s relative surplus. Third, the eu liberalization policy set the seal on the privatization of publicly owned companies in strategic sectors such as electricity and telecommunications. Lastly, the privatization of the equivalent public-sector companies in Latin America,

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often imposed on those countries by the imf’s adjustment plans, opened up significant opportunities for the internationalization of leading Spanish firms. With the aid of the Euro’s purchasing power, Spain’s grande bourgeoisie went global, recolonizing the Latin American markets stricken by the 1998–2001 crisis and snapping up local companies at bargain prices. The two major Spanish banks, bbva and Banco Santander, became the biggest in Ibero-America, just as Telefónica and the Madridbased electricity companies became the biggest in their sectors in that region. In other words, the framework established by Maastricht and the Euro opened the door to the financial repositioning of the Spanish economy within the international division of labour and also to what was to become its central element: the property-development cycle. From an analytical viewpoint, the mechanisms that enabled the property bubble to become the domestic motor of economic expansion in that period, obviating the problems of demand formation in a context governed by neoliberal austerity policies, lie beyond the grasp of orthodox economics. ‘Asset-price Keynesianism’, to borrow a suggestive concept from Robert Brenner’s analysis of the American economy between 1995 and 2006, offers a more fruitful perspective.3 Indeed, asset-price Keynesianism, together with the mechanisms linking increased value of private assets to the growth of internal private consumption, enables us to explain the relative success of the Spanish economy during this period. Its motor lay precisely in the so-called ‘wealth effects’ generated by growth in the value of households’ financial and property assets. So long as this continued to increase, it could sustain a double ‘virtuous circle’ of rising aggregate demand and financial profits, without raising wages or public spending. In this respect, the Spanish case can be regarded as an international laboratory. Unlike the early trials of the financialization of household economies elsewhere, the novelty of the Spanish experiment was the scale of its model, which was based from the outset on the very extensive nature of homeownership. By 2007, the figure for private home-ownership stood at 87 per cent. By contrast, in the us and uk the proportion of home-ownership never rose above 70 per cent. In addition, some 7 million Spanish households— the 35 per cent that comprise the ‘real’ middle class—owned two homes or more. The sustained appreciation of house prices, rising at an average Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London 2006, pp. 293–4, 315–23.

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Figure 2. Real house prices & growth rate of nominal credit relative to GDP Per cent change in real house prices (2001–06) 80

Spain Ireland

rr

70

r

New Zealand

Belgium

40

Canada

UK Denmark

rr

r

50

r

France

60

r

Sweden

r

Finland

r

r

Australia

30

r

r

Greece

USA

20

Netherlands

r

10

r

Portugal

r

Switzerland

0

r

Austria

-10

r

Germany

-20

r

Japan

-30 -4

-2

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Average per cent growth rate of nominal credit relative to GDP (2002–06) Source: Prakash Kannan et al., ‘Macroeconomic Patterns and Monetary Policy in the Run-Up to Asset Price Busts’, imf Working Paper, November 2009, p. 31.

of 12 per cent per year throughout the 1997–2007 ‘boom’ decade, and a record-breaking expansion of credit, supported a historic increase in household consumption among the property-owning strata which, in Spain’s case, constituted the vast majority (see Figure 2).4 To put it synthetically, deficit spending in the years 1997–2007 was decisively transferred from the Spanish state to private households, which, in the final years of the cycle, became net demanders of financing. (This position of negative savings, coupled with high investment in housing and infrastructure, again strains the interpretative framework of orthodox economics.) Parallel to this, nominal wealth in the hands of private 4 Between 2003 and 2006, house prices in Spain rose by an astonishing annual average of 30 per cent. Source: ine (National Statistics Institute).

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households grew more than threefold on the back of the spectacular rise in house prices, the expansion of credit and the rapid growth of the housing stock.5 According to the imf, the Spanish ‘wealth effect’ translated into an annual average increase of 7 per cent in private consumption between 2000 and 2007, compared to 4.9 per cent in the uk, 4 per cent in France, 3.5 per cent in Italy and 1.8 per cent in Germany. Meanwhile employment, driven by both construction and consumption, recorded an accumulated growth rate of 36 per cent, higher than in any other historical period and well above the rates of other eu countries. And all this against the backdrop of a 10 per cent fall in average real wages, such that the entry of 7 million new workers into the labour market produced an increase of only 30 per cent in the total wage bill. The Spanish economy appeared to be adapting itself advantageously to the new context of international financial deregulation. The relative stagnation of productivity throughout the whole 1997–2007 decade and the eternal lack of international competitiveness of its industry were no obstacles to growth. On the contrary, in so far as the lion’s share of economic development took place in sectors whose goods are non-transferable, such as property-development products and personal services, productivity and competitiveness became practically irrelevant variables. It might be said that Spain’s success was founded on a practical reversal of the classical Schumpeterian strategy of income from innovation. At the same time, the formula ‘growth of profits without investment’6—which some have used to summarize the financialization of the central economies— is less applicable to the Spanish model, in which what David Harvey calls secondary-circuit accumulation played a key role.7 Indeed, the Spanish ‘miracle’ can only be understood as a combination of a restoration of profit—and also of demand—through financial avenues, with the Property assets, which play a central role in highly financialized economies, are still not considered a priority for statistics in most oecd countries’ national accounts. In the case of Spain, use has to be made of the estimates by independent researchers such as José Manuel Naredo, Óscar Carpintero and Carmen Marcos, Patrimonio inmobiliario y balance nacional de la economía española 1995–2007, Madrid 2008. 6 The formula is used by Michel Husson, Un pur capitalisme, Lausanne 2008. 7 According to Harvey, when problems of over-accumulation appear in the accumulation process, capitals switch from the ‘primary accumulation circuit’—the production of surplus value in expanded reproduction schemes—to the ‘secondary accumulation circuit’: the circulation of capital in the built environment. The territorial forms this shift can take range from major public works to house building. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, London 1999, pp. 235–8. 5

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generous involvement of accumulation mechanisms operating through the built environment and residential production. Within the Eurozone, meanwhile, Spain’s role during the bubble years was to provide record returns for northern European capital, above all from Germany, France and Britain. Between 2001–06, foreign capitals invested an average of €7 billion a year in Spanish property assets, or the equivalent of nearly 1 per cent of Spain’s gdp, much of it in second homes or investments for British and German nationals. High levels of domestic demand, boosted by asset-price Keynesianism, also offered important markets for German exports. Along with Italy, Greece, Portugal and Ireland, Spain experienced a growing balance of payments deficit, reaching over 9 per cent of gdp between 2006 and 2008, most of it due to European imports.8 Hence the paradoxical effects of the overvaluation of the Euro from 2003, which—while it undermined the Eurozone’s capacity to export beyond its borders—actually ensured the internal purchasing power of its peripheral and southern countries, not least Spain. According to Eurostat, reckoned in terms of purchasing power parity, Spain’s per capita income was higher than Italy’s, almost the same as France’s and just 10 points lower than those of Germany and Britain. On a scale minuscule compared to the monetary circulation between China and the United States, a symbiosis was established within the Eurozone between surplus and deficit poles of European capitalism. In this case, imports by the southern countries, mainly from Germany, were partially financed by northern purchases of property and financial assets in those countries, particularly Spain. In this context, it is not surprising that the general perception in Spain was of having left peripheral status behind, once and for all. For the young generations, it was enough to travel around Europe to realize that the differences had become marginal and that prosperity and modernity, if they existed at all, were to be found as much on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees as beyond.

State backing State intervention played a crucial role in lubricating the different parts of the property circuit to maintain a permanently increasing housing supply. The 1998 Land Act, more commonly known as the ‘build The one Eurozone country whose balance of payments swung conclusively in the other direction was, of course, Germany, which went from a moderate deficit in the late 1990s to a surplus equivalent to over 7 per cent of gdp by 2007. 8

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anywhere’ law, enormously speeded up the procedures for obtaining building permits and made available a huge amount of land for construction. Similarly, policies of reducing the public-housing stock, marginalizing renting and providing tax relief for home-buying had become the central planks of government housing policy during the previous 25 years. Successive reforms of the mortgage market and the legal framework also facilitated the expansion of securitization, a field in which Spain is second in Europe only to the uk. The huge investment in transport infrastructure, which has given Spain proportionately more miles of motorways and high-speed railway networks than any country in Europe, has played an important role in opening up large areas of urbanizable land that were previously lacking in real market value. If to this is added a lax environmental policy, little inclined to put obstacles in the way of urbanization, and subsidies for squandering energy and water on inefficient property developments, the circle is closed, with the state guaranteeing and regulating the smooth running of the financialproperty development circuit. The dependence of economic growth on the property asset-price bubble has had a major effect on the country’s social-geographical divisions (see Figure 3). In the context of Spain’s highly decentralized administrative structure, in which the regional Autonomous Communities and municipal governments have wide-ranging powers over urban development, the environment and transport, local units have typically operated as growth machines in competition with each other. Indeed, local governments have become boosters of their localities, the main advertisers of the miraculous benefits, for both the populations and the entire class of investors, flowing from often disproportionate or poorly planned growth. In illustration of the numerous cases that have combined irrational inflation of investment with unrealistic future projections, suffice it to mention the plans (still going ahead) to build a casino megacomplex, after the manner of Las Vegas, in an arid inland area of the Ebro valley; or the development of eight super-ports, with their respective logistical centres, on a coastline that has at most room for two facilities of this type. The environmental costs of this growth model are incalculable. The effects of mass housing construction in the traditional tourist regions— the coasts and the two archipelagos: Canaries and Balearics—have generated strips of continuous urban fabric along the coastline, between two and five kilometres wide, and stretching uninterruptedly for 100

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Figure 3. Spanish Regional gdp per capita and Newly Built Homes

BASQUE COUNTRY ASTURIAS GALICIA

TA B CAN

RIA NAVARRE LA RIOJA ARAGON

CASTILE AND LEÓN

CATALONIA

B

A

L

E

A

C RI

LES IS

VA

EXTREMADURA

CASTILE-LA MANCHA

LE

NC

IA

MADRID

MURCIA ANDALUSIA

CANARY ISLANDS (shown at half-scale)

0

100 miles

key gdp per capita, 2009

Newly built homes, 2000–07

Up to €18,000 500,000 €18,000 to €23,000 €23,000 to €28,000 More than €28,000

100,000 10,000

Source: ine (National Institute of Statistics) and Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Infrastructures).

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kilometres or more along the Costa del Sol and the Alicante coast. Even in relatively marginal areas, the construction of second homes and green-tourism complexes has ravaged areas of great ecological value, such as the foothills of the Pyrenees and the inland mountain ranges. In terms of land consumption, so-called artificial surfaces expanded by 60 per cent between 1986 and 2006.9

Politics of the bubble The boom years also served to exacerbate long-standing territorial fractures and imbalances within the always-difficult Spanish jigsaw-puzzle. One feature of the property bubble has been a renewed population drain to the coasts and the big cities, while nearly 75 per cent of the inland territory continued to lose inhabitants. Existing urban hierarchies have been strengthened: Madrid, the city most favoured by the growth years, is now the centre of a metropolitan region with more than 6 million inhabitants and has become the third largest European city in demographic and economic terms. In addition to Madrid’s central position in the ‘secondary circuit’ of Spanish financial accumulation, it is home to the headquarters of most of the big Spanish multinationals operating in Latin America and Europe, an emerging ‘global city’. By contrast, most of the other big cities in Spain have been relegated to secondary positions, putting their energies into different strategies of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’, aimed at capturing locational rents from international tourism.10 Barcelona has become a global example of this strategy: its policies before and after the 1992 Olympics have been ‘exported’ to Latin America, in particular, as the great model of urban regeneration, and reduplicated, with contradictory results, in Medellín and Valparaíso; but Barcelona’s relative success on this front is still a Pyrrhic victory when set alongside its long-term decline as Spain’s leading industrial centre.11 Politically, too, the effect has been to exacerbate territorial rivalries and inflame the particularist claims of peripheral nationalisms over 9 Data from corine (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land Cover programme, available from the European Environment Agency website. 10 See David Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, vol. 71, no. 1, 1989, pp. 3–17. 11 So insistent has this type of propaganda become that a leading satirical periodical in Buenos Aires has dubbed itself Barcelona. Una solución europea a los problemas de los argentinos—‘Barcelona: a European solution for Argentinians’ problems’.

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questions such as taxes, transport, regional configuration and water, in short supply across two-thirds of the country. At the same time, a complete consensus prevailed across the mainstream parties on the merits of the country’s economic model. The Spanish political class has historically exhibited an extraordinary complacency on this question; encouraging the rise in property values was considered a matter of state, pursued by both psoe governments (1982–96; 2004 to the present) and the pp under Aznar (1996–2004). At regional level, the Socialist-run Autonomous Community of Andalusia was just as deeply implicated in handing out loans and construction permits to property developers as were the hard-line pp administrations in Murcia and Valencia, or the big-business Catalan nationalists of the Convergence and Union party in Catalonia. When the CiU was replaced, from 2003–10, by a coalition of the Catalan Socialists and two smaller parties, the Republican Left and the environmentalist Initiative for Catalonia–Greens, propertydevelopment practices continued unchanged. The main mortgage lenders were the country’s 45 cajas de ahorros, semipublic savings-and-loans banks administered by depositors, employees and local political representatives. Regional and district councils could earn important revenues by re-zoning green-field sites for urban development and selling the land to a property developer, who would pay for it with a loan from a caja run by the same councillors or their friends. With house prices rising at an average 12 per cent per year, it seemed a good deal all round. The bi-partisan nature of the process was illustrated in Valencia, where the pp administration deployed extremely aggressive legislation to expropriate small landowners, in order to put together the large packages of land that a big developer required. The legislation had been drafted by the psoe federal government and was used in several other Autonomous Communities under psoe control. Corruption and nepotism were given full rein: friends and family of the pp in Valencia and of the psoe in Andalusia were among the most notorious beneficiaries.12 The construction craze did not go unopposed. In some of the worst-affected areas, environmentalist groups, denouncing both the disproportionate despoliation of the landscape and the corruption of local officials involved, succeeded in bringing down local governments and even Autonomous Community administrations (Aragon in 2003; the Balearic Islands in 2007). Between 2005 and 2007, the main Spanish cities were shaken by an imaginative cycle of protests against rising house prices, mobilizing around slogans such as V de Vivienda, on the model of ‘V for Vendetta’ (‘vivienda’ being the Spanish word for housing) and mounting demonstrations of tens of thousands of people.

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But if both the major parties, the psoe and the pp, are implicated in Spain’s asset-price Keynesian model, it is the talante (approach, way of going about things) of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that has especially marked first the high boom years and then the crash. Spain is the only European country in which mass mobilizations against the 2003 us–uk–Spanish invasion of Iraq had—belatedly—an impact at government level. For the following year, Aznar’s attempt to blame the 11 March Islamist bomb attacks, which killed 192 people in Madrid’s central train station, on the Basque group eta provoked a huge social mobilization, directly linked to those of the previous year against Spain’s participation in the Iraq war and the Aznar government’s narcissistic authoritarianism. The effect was to reverse the two parties’ standings in the opinion polls and sweep Zapatero into power. The mobilization expressed the rise of professional sectors that had grown thanks to the country’s accelerated modernization and, especially, of a younger generation, affected to a greater or lesser degree by job insecurity, generally more educated and secular than its parents. The progre image13 of Zapatero’s Spain was fostered by policies such as ‘dialogue’ with the trade unions, a token wage for carers, a same-sex marriage law and initial gestures towards a truce with eta. Abroad, Zapatero carried through his pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq, but compensated by sending them to Afghanistan. He fell foul of the powerful prisa media group, however—El País, Digital+, Cadena ser— which had hitherto always backed the Socialists, and depended instead on support from a new paper, Público, and the tv channel La Sexta. From the first, Zapatero’s success had a lot to do with the conscious use of political marketing strategies; the new government’s talante was essentially cosmetic. Social expenditure was very slightly increased, but not so as to jeopardize financial profits, or the income of the supersalaried executives of the multinationals based in Spain. No alternative was developed to the federal-state model, hobbled by tensions between peripheral nationalisms and a centralizing Spanish nationalism, in an interplay that was becoming increasingly fraught yet still functioned as far as local property-development machines were concerned. Nor was there any attempt to control the increasingly over-heated housing Progre is a half-pleasant, half-sardonic diminutive of progresista, or progressive. It denotes the communication style and rhetoric of the middle-class, institutional centre left, based on an essentially uncritical, do-gooder social liberalism. 13

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market—let alone to construct an alternative model. In the 2008 election psoe slightly increased its share of the vote, winning 43.6 per cent, compared to 42.6 per cent in 2004—though this may have come mainly from the leftist Izquierda Unida, whose vote fell from 5 per cent in 2004 to 3.8 per cent in 2008, while the pp vote rose from 37.7 per cent in 2004 to 40.1 per cent in 2008.

Insecurities As long as credit flowed and house prices continued to be borne up by the bubble, it seemed little matter that social expenditure was extremely low, that wages had stagnated or even fallen, or that the Spanish labour market had one of the highest rates of temporary contracts in Europe. (Spain’s chronically high unemployment rates—between 8 and 12 per cent for most of the early 2000s—in fact reflect high rates of temporary work, affecting more than a third of the labour force, and the high participation in seasonal sectors, such as tourism; in other words, fast rotation through insecure employment, rather than structural unemployment as such.) Rising property values came to supplement an under-funded pension system as a guarantee of income in old age. Young people, often forced to delay leaving their parents’ home, might nevertheless hope to benefit from the increasing value of family assets, either by way of inheritance, family investment or parental help in getting a mortgage. The problem of providing care, in the absence of decent social provision, was eased by the arrival in Spain of a gigantic army, several million strong, of transnational domestic workers. These women, mostly without residence permits, took over looking after children, the elderly and the disabled, and did the domestic chores in several million middleclass homes. By 2010 there were nearly 6 million foreigners in Spain, the country’s population increasing in just ten years from 39.5 million to almost 47 million, a jump of more than 18 per cent. Of the incomers, 2.67 million were eu citizens, in large part from new member states: nearly 800,000 from Romania alone; 2 million from Latin America, principally Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia; a million from Africa and the Maghreb, including 650,000 Moroccans. What better token of the fact that Spain had left behind its traditional peripheral status than the arrival of its first wave of mass immigration? As expected, the migrants largely occupied low-paid jobs in construction, agriculture, domestic work and also sexual services. A complex system of residency permits,

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job quotas, European and internal borders skilfully subordinated these workers to the needs of an expanding economy, creating long, sometimes lifelong, periods of exclusion from citizenship that left them defenceless in the labour market.14 Nevertheless, as they gradually established themselves and their families from the early 2000s, the migrants too were invited to join in the property bonanza. Together with the young people born in the 1970s— the post-Franco baby boomers—they stimulated and sustained the final years of the cycle: Spanish ‘subprimes’ consisted in granting at least a million mortgages to vulnerable segments of society between 2003 and 2007. Naturally, a widespread increase in indebtedness was one of the side-effects of Spain’s assets euphoria—the ratio of indebtedness to available income rising, by 2007, to the highest level of any oecd country—though the risks were heavily concentrated in households with lower incomes and fewer assets. As in the United States, the magic of refinancing through the sustained increase in housing prices was regarded as sufficient security for the risks in credit. Unlike the United States, however, Spanish law does not consider the asset underlying the mortgage—i.e., the dwelling—to be sufficient guarantee in the event of default by the borrower. This means that the guarantees securing loans might include the homes of the mortgagees’ relatives and friends. This would result in alarming chain reactions of repossessions after the property bubble burst.

The crash The first to notice that the bubble was coming to an end were the property developers. After nearly 900,000 housing starts in 2006— exceeding those of France, Germany and Italy put together—sales began to fall away. Mediterranean coastal developments were especially hard hit by the bursting of the uk housing bubble in mid-2007, leading to problems for British second-home owners. Re-zoned land awaiting development, bought at the height of the bubble with loans from the cajas, started to be seen as a bad investment. By the end of 2008 there were a million unsold homes on the market, while Spanish The years 2000–01 and 2004–05 saw a series of mobilizations by undocumented migrants, including sit-ins in churches and official buildings, as well as strikes by migrant workers in the agro-industrial districts of the south-east. 14

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household indebtedness had risen to 84 per cent of gdp. Collapsing property developers began landing the cajas with massive bad loans: in July 2008 the Martinsa–Fadesa construction company filed for bankruptcy with debts of over €5bn. The Zapatero government’s initial response was to try to pass the crisis off as a global phenomenon, only marginally affecting Spain, in comparison to the—far larger—debacle of the subprime-related market in the United States. At most, Madrid acknowledged that it would be necessary to give some help to the cajas—the possibility of a €50bn bail-out fund was floated in October 2008—and to expand short-term deficit spending, in tandem with the rest of the g20. However, these predictions were quickly shown to be hopelessly optimistic as unemployment doubled, pushing the jobless rate up to nearly 20 per cent by the end of 2009. The destruction of jobs was not confined to construction, but also affected the consumer-goods industry and market services. The virtuous circle of asset-price Keynesianism had gone into reverse, generating a severe ‘poverty effect’ which, together with the contraction of credit, drastically reduced private consumption. Owing to the high proportion of employees on short-term and temporary contracts, businesses were able to reduce their workforces quickly and at very little cost in response to falling demand, which was then in turn further depressed by rising unemployment, reaching over 40 per cent among under-25s. Government revenues plummeted, as gdp contracted by 7.7 points, peak to trough, and the 2006 fiscal surplus of 2 per cent of gdp turned into a 2009 deficit of over 11 per cent. Like its European counterparts, the Zapatero government focused on a policy of socializing the losses of the country’s oligarchic blocs. This very much included the major Spanish construction companies, some of them—acs, fcc and Ferrovial—now global players, having been generously fattened up by more than 25 years of expansive infrastructure budgets, and who now demanded that their public-works contracts be maintained, whatever the cost. The large private banks—Santander and bbva are the biggest—appeared to be better provisioned than some of their British and us competitors, having captured the deposits of the middle classes of Latin America. In fact they now went on a spending spree, Santander in particular adding British building societies and American savings banks to its already extensive Latin American and Asian interests, creating a behemoth too big to fail—and perhaps too big to save.

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For their part, the cajas remain saturated with debt. Estimates of their total capital shortfall vary from €15bn (the Bank of Spain’s figure) to around €100bn, which would be approaching 10 per cent of gdp; in March 2009 the Caja Castilla–La Mancha alone was bailed out to the tune of €9bn.15 In June 2009, Zapatero announced plans for a €99bn rescue fund, the frob, and a merger programme that would reduce the 45 cajas to 17; they were also instructed to raise their core-capital levels to 10 per cent by September 2011, which would require an extra €20bn– 50bn in cash. Sidestepping this, the cajas have also been encouraged, through the Bank of Spain, to swap property developers’ debts for real estate, land and houses, valued somewhat fictitiously at 10 per cent below their peak price, in order to flatter their balance-sheets and avoid technical bankruptcy. As in Ireland, however, losses have tended to exceed initial estimates: in March 2011 revelations of bigger-than-anticipated problems at the Alicante-based Caja de Ahorros Mediterráneo, Spain’s fourth-largest caja, scotched the merger plan in which it was involved. After their record-breaking rise, Spanish house prices have so far fallen back by little more than 10 per cent (see Figure 4). By mid-2009, the pressure at eu and, more specifically, Eurozone level swiftly shifted from bank-rescue packages—the total pledged may have come to €2.5 trillion from the eu as a whole—to the austerity measures necessitated by the transfer of finance capital’s losses onto the nation-states’ books. From early 2010, budget cuts, wage freezes and the dismantling of social programmes were introduced in one country after another. The crisis was explicitly seen as an opportunity for state-by-state ‘structural adjustments’ according to the well-known prescriptions. The role of the eu’s summit institutions in the crisis could not have been more closely linked to financial interests. In this sequence of events, the sovereign-debt crises, especially the episodes involving Greece and Ireland, must be seen as providing an enormous business opportunity for the big European— German, French and British—banks, the main holders of the European countries’ sovereign bonds. Aided by the rating agencies, the announcements of the insolvency or financial fragility of the Eurozone’s deficit members—Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy—enabled them to amass enormous profits based on debt-bond interest rates, artificially The Economist has proposed a ‘doomsday scenario’ figure of €270bn which, it points out, would be smaller than the Irish banks’ shortfall, relative to gdp: ‘Under siege’, 13 January 2011. 15

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Figure 4. House-price rises, 2001–06, and subsequent falls Spain

Ireland

France

UK

Denmark

Sweden

Finland

Italy

USA

Greece

Netherlands

Portugal

–30

–20

–10

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50

60

70

Per cent change in housing prices, 2001–06 Per cent change from recent peak

Source: Prakash Kannan et al., ‘Macroeconomic Patterns and Monetary Policy in the Run-Up to Asset Price Busts’, imf Working Paper, November 2009, p. 29.

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blown up at a time when it was impossible for financial profits in the private and household sectors to return to their pre-crisis levels.

Zapatero’s volte-face In April 2010, as the Greek debt crisis unfolded, Zapatero came under increasing pressure from Berlin, Brussels and the ecb to impose austerity measures and labour-market restructuring—effectively launching an offensive against the state-sector employees who still had long-term contracts and wage-bargaining rights. Unwilling to assault key sections of his base, yet incapable of mobilizing it towards any alternative solution, Zapatero procrastinated. Finally on 12 May, apparently after further armtwisting from the Obama White House, he announced a drastic austerity programme: public-sector wages slashed by 5 per cent, benefits and pensions cut, investment projects cancelled, the retirement age raised, wage bargaining restricted, sackings made simpler. The result was an immediate plunge in the polls: from level-pegging with the pp, the psoe dropped to 7 points behind, then carried on falling. Trade-union leaders were trapped between the pressure from their rank and file and their anxieties about precipitating the fall of the psoe government. A general strike on 29 September 2010 was the main focus for social opposition to the Zapatero measures, but the leadership prevented some of the best-organized sectors, such as transport workers, from coming out, and failed to mobilize the huge mass of short-contract workers in services and retail. The union leadership then promptly signed an agreement on cutbacks in pension provision and a rise in the retirement age. The mask of a modern progressive republicanism has fallen as the Socialist Party government lined up unambiguously with the hegemonic financial bloc. Following the script that has characterized the current phase of the crisis, the extra burdens on Spanish public-debt issue have led to measures in line with the most orthodox structural adjustment policies. In the final analysis, this means that public expenditure is subject to the political oversight of the financial agents. The result has been the desertion of a large part of the psoe electorate, the Party now at an all-time low in the polls. On 2 April 2011, with unemployment soaring (see Figure 5) and the Socialists trailing by 16 points, Zapatero announced that he would not be running as the psoe leader in the March 2012 general election. The main pressures for him to resign came from within the party, particularly from Socialist candidates in the May 2011 regional elections who wanted

lópez & rodríguez: Spain

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Figure 5. Selected Eurozone unemployment rates, 2006–11 (%) 20 Spain

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Ireland Greece Portugal

10

France Italy Germany

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0 2006

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Source: World Economic Outlook Database, April 2011.

to distance themselves from his political legacy. The front-runner to succeed him is Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, a veteran of the psoe right whose political career began under Felipe González. Rubalcaba has been at the Interior Ministry since 2006 and is notorious for having formulated an even tougher, ‘war on terror’ response to the Basque separatist movement eta than the pp. As a result of this strong-man stance, he was rewarded with two other high positions in the Zapatero government: vice-president and spokesman of the government. As a man of the felipista old guard, Rubalcaba is favoured by the mighty prisa group and its chief mouthpiece, El País. The leading candidate of the psoe’s zapaterista wing and the Mediapro group, Defence Minister Carme Chacón, withdrew when she saw which way the wind was blowing. The crisis has brought Spain face to face with the fragility of the economic structures underpinning its long decade of prosperity, and the psoe with the aporias that were the foundation of its politics. Financial engineering perpetuated the fiction that an expanded home-owning middle-class

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majority had achieved permanent levels of prosperity. The collapse of the property bubble has torn the veil from a highly polarized social order, with a large proportion of the population deep in debt, many out of work and dependent on public services doubly hit by spending cuts and privatization. If to this we add that the worst hit are the young—facing starkly diminished prospects compared to their elders—and foreign-born workers, then the lines projecting the cost of the crisis onto the most vulnerable groups become clear. Spain has long been the most Europhiliac of eu member states; Europeanism was deeply associated in people’s imaginations with the post-Franco democratization and modernization of the country, and the Spanish electorate has historically been almost completely uncritical of the eu. Such complacency has now disappeared. On 15 May, in the run up to the 22 May regional elections—and exactly a year after Zapatero had announced his swingeing cuts—a huge wave of social protest swept across the country. Tens of thousands of young demonstrators took to the streets, then set up camp in the central squares of a score of Spanish cities, including Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona and Puerta del Sol in Madrid: students, workers, employed and unemployed, staking a claim to public space, with a salute to the young Arab demonstrators of Pearl Roundabout and Tahrir Square (see page 29). In Puerta del Sol the occupation established a permanent popular assembly, voting daily on all decisions. Among the slogans of the 15M movement: ‘For a transition to democracy!’—‘We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers’—‘ppsoe: psoe and pp, both the same crap’—‘Real democracy now!’ The 20 May Manifesto approved by the Sol’s popular assembly assailed political corruption, the closed-list electoral system (in which only the names of the party and its leader appear on the ballot paper), the power of the ecb–imf and the injustice of the ruling-class response to the crisis. At the time of writing, the ‘campers’ have been holding the squares for nearly two weeks—during which period the psoe has had the worst drubbing in its history, losing control of Barcelona, Seville and four acs, as well as town halls across its stronghold of Andalusia.16 But if Mariano Rahoy’s pp takes power in the general election, due in less than a year, it will confront the forces of the 15M movement, the indignados and ‘youth without a future’: ‘No house, no job, no pension—no fear!’ The psoe won only 28 per cent of the vote in the 22 May regional elections, a 7 point drop; but the pp was only 2 points up, at 38 per cent. Meanwhile Izquierda Unida polled 6.3 per cent, up from 5.5 in 2007, but—punished in part for local coalitions with psoe—taking only 210,000 of the 1.5m votes the Socialists had lost.

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Figure 6. Claims to Eurozone periphery domestic banks and public sector Claims as per cent of equity of banks with foreign exposures, 2010 Q3

Germany France UK 0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Claims as per cent of total bank equity, 2010 Q3

Germany France UK 0

20 Claims on Greece, Ireland and Portugal

40

60 Claims on Spain

Source: imf, Regional Economic Outlook: Europe, May 2011, p. 13.

The outlook for economic recovery in Spain remains bleak. The scale of the housing bubble; the centrality of asset-price Keynesianism to growth since the 1990s; the depth of the post-bust recession, exacerbated by truly draconian austerity measures; the strength of the Euro (thanks in part to quantitative easing from the us Federal Reserve), which hits non-Eurozone tourism; and a tightening of credit by the ecb—all this suggests that any return to growth in Spain is a very long way off indeed. The immediate prospect is almost certain to be further retrenchment and therefore an increase in Spain’s deficit. This poses severe dilemmas for the Eurozone’s attempts to pretend that the crisis is just a temporary liquidity problem which can be managed by funnelling ecb–imf bridging loans to the countries in question during the time it takes to grow their way out of debt. In fact, the crisis is that of the major German, French and British banks, hugely exposed by the bursting of the periphery’s property bubbles (see Figure 6). Rather than face the trauma of a

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full-blown banking crisis at home, Berlin, Paris and London have been running what one central banker has described as a public-sector Ponzi scheme, ‘only sustainable as long as additional amounts of money are available to continue the pretence’: Some of the original bondholders are being paid with the official loans that also finance the remaining primary deficits. When it turns out that countries cannot meet the austerity and structural conditions imposed on them, and therefore cannot return to the voluntary market, these loans will eventually be rolled over and enhanced by Eurozone members and international organizations . . . European governments are finding it more convenient to postpone the day of reckoning and continue throwing money into the peripheral countries, rather than face domestic financial disruption.17

The collapse of the Spanish model threatens this pyramid scheme from several directions: first, German and French banks’ exposure is far greater in Spain than in Greece and Ireland; second, the scale of the cajas’ problems has yet to be fathomed; third, the social problem—a population that has grown by 18 per cent in the past decade, largely by immigration; nearly one in two of the younger generation unemployed— is potentially more explosive, as social and welfare spending shrinks still further, from levels already low compared to those in central Europe. A Spanish debt crisis could finally capsize the eu3’s attempt to make the peripheral populations bail out the stricken banks, which are reaping usurious, artificially inflated rates on government bonds to compensate for the lack of financial profits in the private sector. For that reason, every effort will no doubt be made to avoid one.

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Mario Blejer, ‘Europe is running a giant Ponzi scheme’, ft, 5 May 2011.

from puerta del sol

‘Yes, We Question this Democracy’ Response from an indignada in Puerta del Sol to a TV presenter who told protesters ‘not to question democracy’: Yes, we question this democracy. We question this democracy because it fails to support popular sovereignty: the markets impose decisions for their own benefit and the parties in Parliament are not standing up to this global fact. Neither in our country nor in the European Parliament are they fighting to put an end to financial speculation, whether in currency or in sovereign debt. We question this democracy because the parties in power do not look out for the collective good, but for the good of the rich. Because they understand growth as the growth of businessmen’s profits, not the growth of social justice, redistribution, public services, access to housing and other necessities. Because the parties in power are concerned only for their own continuation in office, making deals to stay in power and leaving their electoral programme unfulfilled. Because no politician has to live with what they legislate for their ‘subjects’: insecurity, mortgage debt and uncertainty. We question this democracy because it colludes in corruption, allowing politicians to hold a private post at the same time as public office, to profit from privileged information, to step into jobs as business advisors after leaving office, making it very profitable to be a politician. We question this democracy because it consists in an absolute delegation of decision-making into the hands of politicians that are nominated in closed lists and to whom we have no access of any kind. Nor is there any proportionality between votes and seats. We question this democracy because it is absurd that the only way to ‘punish’ a party is to vote for another one with which one does not agree. We question this democracy because the parties in power do not even comply with the social provisions of the Constitution: justice is not applied equally, there are no decent jobs nor housing for all, foreign-born workers are not treated as citizens. Excuses are not good enough for us. We do not want to choose between really existing democracy and the dictatorships of the past. We want a different life. Real democracy now!

—Beatriz García

introduction to platonov

The year 1934, his thirty-fifth, was a significant watershed in the life of Andrei Platonov. He had already written The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, the novels for which he is today best known, but neither had been published in full. Soviet readers knew him mainly for a few short stories and, above all, his semi-satirical account of collectivization, ‘For Future Use’, which had been met by a storm of official criticism when it appeared in 1931. For the next three years, Platonov was unable to publish anything. But in the spring of 1934, he was included in a brigade of writers sent to Turkmenistan to report on the progress of Sovietization, and the same year was asked to contribute to a series of almanachs. Under Gorky’s general editorship, these were to celebrate the completion of the second Five-Year Plan in 1937; but they never appeared. The text reproduced here was written for one of these, titled ‘Notebooks’; it arrived on Gorky’s desk in early January 1935—a month after the assassination of Kirov, an event which unleashed a wave of purges that presaged the terror to come. Within a few days Gorky had rejected Platonov’s text as ‘unsuitable’ and ‘pessimistic’; in early March the organizing secretary of the Writers’ Union publicly denounced the unpublished article as ‘reactionary’, ‘reflecting the philosophy of elements hostile to socialism’. The text was probably written in the first half of 1934, after Platonov’s return from Central Asia; a notebook entry from mid-April—‘dialectic of nature in the Karakum desert’—makes clear he was already considering its key themes there. Many of these relate directly to the concerns of Happy Moscow, the novel he was then writing; certain details would also be re-used in the screenplay ‘Father– Mother’ (see nlr 53). The text is, among other things, a riposte to Gorky’s own views on nature: ‘our earth is ever more generously revealing to us its countless treasures’, intoned one article from 1932. Platonov, a hydrological expert in his native Voronezh region during the droughts of the early 1920s, had an altogether different conception, combining faith in technology with knowledge of the harshness of the environment on which mankind depended. ‘On the First Socialist Tragedy’ occupies an unusual place in Platonov’s oeuvre. In generic terms, it belongs among his many journalistic writings. But those from his Voronezh period (1921–26) are more agitational in character, while his literary criticism (1937 onwards) focuses above all on aesthetic questions. Philosophical texts, as such, are very much a rarity—though it is possible more may emerge from an archive that is still, sixty years after his death, not fully catalogued. The manuscript of this text was first published in Russian in 1991; a second, typescript version appeared in 1993. The latter, which is what Gorky would have read, places much greater emphasis on the problems facing the ussr’s ‘engineers of the soul’. The translation that appears here is based on Platonov’s original manuscript—terse and prescient in equal measure.

andrei platonov

On the First Socialist Tragedy One should keep one’s head down and not revel in life: our time is better and more serious than blissful enjoyment. Anyone who revels in it will certainly be caught and perish, like a mouse that has crawled into a mousetrap to ‘revel in’ a piece of lard on the bait pedal. Around us there is a lot of lard, but every piece is bait. One should stand with the ordinary people in their patient socialist work, and that’s all. This mood and consciousness correspond to the way nature is constructed. Nature is not great, it is not abundant. Or it is so harshly arranged that it has never bestowed its abundance and greatness on anyone. This is a good thing, otherwise—in historical time—all of nature would have been plundered, wasted, eaten up, people would have revelled in it down to its very bones; there would always have been appetite enough. If the physical world had not had its one law—in fact, the basic law: that of the dialectic— people would have been able to destroy the world completely in a few short centuries. More: even without people, nature would have destroyed itself into pieces of its own accord. The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of the daunting harshness of nature’s construction, and it is only thanks to this that the historical development of humankind became possible. Otherwise everything on earth would long since have ended, as when a child plays with sweets that have melted in his hands before he has even had time to eat them. Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie? Of course, it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not on the whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading. The truth, in my view, lies in the fact that ‘technology . . . decides everything’. Technology is, indeed, the subject of the contemporary historical tragedy, if by technology we understand not only the complex of man-made instruments of production, but also the organization of society, solidly founded on the technology of production, and even ideology. Ideology, incidentally, is located not in the superstructure, not ‘on high’, but within, in the middle of society’s sense of itself. To be precise, one needs to include in technology the technician himself—the person—so that one does not obtain an iron-hard understanding of the question. The situation between technology and nature is a tragic one. The aim of technology is: ‘give me a place to stand and I will move the world’. But the construction of nature is such that it does not like to be beaten: one can move the world by taking up the lever with the required moment, but one must lose

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so much along the way and while the long lever is turning that, in practice, the victory is useless. This is an elementary episode of dialectics. Let us take a contemporary fact: the splitting of the atom. The same thing. The worldwide moment will arrive when, having expended a quantity of energy n on the destruction of the atom, we will obtain n + 1 as a result, and will be so happy with this wretched addition, because this absolute gain was obtained as a result of a seemingly artificial alteration of the very principle of nature; that is, the dialectic. Nature keeps itself to itself, it can only function by exchanging like for like, or even with something added in its favour; but technology strains to have it the other way around. The external world is protected from us by the dialectic. Therefore, though it seems like a paradox: the dialectic of nature is the greatest resistance to technology and the enemy of humankind. Technology is intended for and works towards the overturning or softening of the dialectic. So far it has only modestly succeeded, and so the world still cannot be kind to us. At the same time, the dialectic alone is our sole instructor and resource against an early, senseless demise in childish enjoyment. Just as it was the force that created all technology. In sociology, in love, in the depths of man the dialectic functions just as invariably. A man who had a ten-year-old son left him with the boy’s mother, and married a beauty. The child began to miss his father, and patiently, clumsily hanged himself. A gram of enjoyment at one end was counterbalanced by a tonne of grave soil at the other. The father removed the rope from the child’s neck and soon followed in his wake, into the grave. He wanted to revel in the innocent beauty, he wanted to bear his love not as a duty shared with one woman, but as a pleasure. Do not revel—or die. Some naive people might object: the present crisis of production refutes such a point of view. Nothing refutes it. Imagine the highly complex armature of society in contemporary imperialism and fascism, giving off starvation and destruction for mankind in those parts, and it becomes clear at what cost the increase in productive forces was attained. Self-destruction in fascism and war between states are both losses of high-level production and vengeance for it. The tragic knot is cut without being resolved. The result is not even a tragedy in a classical sense. A world without the ussr would undoubtedly destroy itself of its own accord within the course of the next century. The tragedy of man, armed with machinery and a heart, and with the dialectic of nature, must be resolved in our country by means of socialism. But it must be understood that this is a very serious task. The ancient life on the ‘surface’ of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with equivalent force.

john grahl

A C A P I TA L I S T C O N T R A R I A N Diagnoses and Prescriptions of Jean-Luc Gréau

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early four years after the onset of the worst financial crisis since 1929, a remarkable unanimity as to ‘what is to be done’ appears to prevail among mainstream Anglophone economists. Emergency liquidity supplies to the banks, to keep credit flowing while balance sheets are corrected; a stiff dose of Keynesian public spending, to mitigate the world recession; then a return to deficit-cutting austerity—combined, if possible, with ‘taking advantage of the crisis’ to push through any desirable structural reforms in pensions, retirement age, social provision. The arguments, noisy enough, have been almost entirely tactical, centred on quantities and timings. The strategy itself, aiming to return to business as usual as quickly as possible, has hardly been questioned, despite the fact that the specified measures have shown little sign of working to date—and in sharp contrast to the clash of ideas that followed 1929. But if mainstream economics has become a depressingly uniform field in the us and uk, across the Channel the landscape remains more variegated. France has a well-deserved reputation for critical economic thought; from the left, there have been important contributions from neo-Marxist and post-Keynesian analysts, as well as the rich and diverse literature produced by the Regulation School. More unusually, there exist powerful critics of neoliberalism on the centre right. Jean-Luc Gréau, a long-time economic advisor at the French employers’ association, is one of the few economists both to have predicted the crisis and to have proposed an alternative set of solutions to those espoused by the G8. Gréau was born in Hadjout, then Marengo, in French Algeria in 1943, and studied economics in Montpellier from 1962. He joined the Conseil new left review 69 may jun 2011

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National du Patronat Français, as it then was, in 1969—the cnpf would be rebranded as the Mouvement des Entreprises de France, or medef, in 1998—retiring from a senior post in 2004. Gréau has described himself as ‘a mixture of a Keynesian and a Schumpeterian who recognizes his debts to Marx and, above all, to Adam Smith. Difficult to classify.’1 A frequent contributor to Le Débat, his published work takes the form of extended discussion of the general questions of political economy at stake, rather than analytical number-crunching as such. Gréau’s most recent book, La Trahison des économistes (‘the treason of the economists’) is a scathing attack on the intellectual apologists for neoliberalism. Published in 2008, it has become a best seller in France since the fall of Lehman Brothers. But La Trahison builds on two previous works that were published well before the crisis: Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance (‘capitalism laid low by its finance’—or, more literally, ‘made ill by its finance’) appeared in 1998. As its title suggests, it concentrates on the economic malfunctions associated with the transformation of the Western financial system since the 1970s. L’Avenir du capitalisme (‘the future of capitalism’), published in 2005, extends and deepens the original critique, looking not just at financial change but at the process of globalization as a whole.2 Although there must now be a wide gap between Gréau and his former employers—medef itself has embraced many neoliberal positions— and although Gréau seeks interlocutors across the political spectrum, his remains a voice of the centre right. Gréau wants to restore capitalism, not to replace it. His critique embraces not only the contemporary functioning of the financial markets but also the ‘expenditure-driven state’. He has suggested that government spending becomes unproductive when it exceeds a third of gdp—a limit that would imply massive retrenchment in most European countries.3 Nonetheless, his is a voice worth listening to, for the clear and thorough analysis he articulates and the trenchant critique he offers of the course taken by capitalist development since the late seventies. Interview with El Pais, 2 October 2008. Jean-Luc Gréau, Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance, Gallimard: Paris 1998, 383 pp.; L’Avenir du capitalisme, Gallimard: Paris 2005, 299 pp.; La Trahison des économistes, Gallimard: Paris 2008, 245 pp. 3 Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance, p. 360; henceforth cmf. 1

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grahl: Gréau

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Non-productive finance Published in the midst of the 1997–98 Asian crisis, and on the eve of European monetary union, Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance kicks off with a ‘simple yet scandalous’ question. If the financial markets really do rule the world, as the mass media suggest, then how and when did they come to assume such a powerful position? What are the limits of their power, and what instruments do the public authorities retain to inflect the advanced economies? As often in critical economic studies, the analysis starts from an account of the long post-war boom, the ‘thirty glorious years’ of Fourastié—although Gréau thinks that twenty-five is a more accurate figure. He argues that there was nothing out of the ordinary about this period: ‘The post-war expansion was not the fruit of exceptional circumstances.’4 Externally, the international monetary order of the Bretton Woods era stabilized exchange rates but allowed devaluations to correct major imbalances, thus supporting the monetary sovereignty of Western states, which also included control over capital flows. (Gréau perhaps underestimates here the role of international organizations in shielding individual states from foreign-exchange pressures: the European Payments Union, in particular, managed the supply of dollars to European countries throughout the 1950s.) Internally, it was not Keynesian fiscal policy but an accommodating monetary policy and, crucially, an elastic supply of bank credit for industry that were the essential conditions for the economic successes of the ‘glorious’ quartercentury. They permitted a sustained period of growth and innovation, which Gréau regards as the normal outcome of capitalism, provided that competition among industrial enterprises is not impaired. What went wrong? ‘The foundations of the system were shaken externally, by the fragility of the official exchange-rate system; and internally, by an increasingly lax management of both the private and the public sectors, under the influence of the Keynesian theories that had become dominant’.5 It is above all in the external factors, however, that Gréau detects ‘the germs of disorder’. Bretton Woods was a system of fixed exchange rates against the dollar, and different analysts have attributed its demise to each of these terms—growing problems in maintaining fixed exchange rates, or the increasing instability of the dollar—in the context of an increasing liberalization of international capital flows. 4

cmf, p. 383.

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cmf, p. 115.

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Gréau follows Robert Triffin by arguing that dollar weakness was the key factor, leading to the final abandonment of their exchange-rate pegs by most European countries in the spring of 1973. After the breakdown of the fixed exchange-rate system, the narrative of Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance emphasizes the role of rising state indebtedness in propelling the financial transformation. For Gréau, the policies adopted to deal with 1970s stagflation first in the us, with the dramatic monetary tightening of the 1979 ‘Volcker shock’, and then across the advanced economies, ‘threw the baby out with the bath water’. Central banks hardened their policies, using their control over interest rates to deter inflation rather than to promote investment. This destroyed the measured but elastic credit system that had supported growth. The switch in monetary policy made bank credits both more expensive and less secure, leading both firms and governments to place greater reliance on the security markets. An important role was also played by the huge institutional investors, who reinforced the demand for securities and accelerated the retreat of the banks from the direct provision of credit to firms. During the post-war expansion, financial markets had ‘followed a straight path of development: the credit market, the money market and the bond market formed a coherent whole’. The new bond-market system ‘destroyed both continuity and coherence’.6 One consequence of the Volcker shock was the debt crisis in developing countries. These had borrowed extensively in the 1970s but now found three factors working against them: real interest rates on their dollar loans were much higher; the dollar itself appreciated rapidly, raising the burden of indebtedness; and their export markets in the us and in Western Europe were stagnant or in recession. The Third World debt crisis rebounded on the big Western banks that had made the loans; one of the banks’ responses was to sell the loans at a discount to other investors. Gréau suggests that this securitization of impaired bank claims on developing countries was an important early example of the shift from banks as intermediaries to their increasing involvement in the security markets. In successive chapters on the ‘old’ and ‘new’ equity, foreign-exchange and bond markets, Gréau underlines the fact that the transformation of the financial system has involved not only much greater interdependence between them, but also deep changes in the nature of the financial markets themselves. One of the most 6

cmf, p. 253.

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fundamental changes is, precisely, this switch from the bank’s function as intermediary between the suppliers and users of funds, to an increasing reliance on marketable securities, where the realization of financial claims depends not on the solidity of a deposit-taking bank but on the liquidity of the markets in which such claims are traded. With financial transformation, according to Gréau, ‘capital separated itself from enterprise. It now inhabits the financial sphere.’7 This happened, firstly, because of the switch from classical bank credit to the issue of marketable securities as the dominant mode of corporate finance; and, secondly, because, within the securities markets themselves, the primary markets—where securities are issued by the actual users of capital—were increasingly subordinated to the secondary markets, where existing securities are bought and sold on what has become a staggering scale. Gréau argues, with some exaggeration, that the tail did not wag the dog in this way in the past. The secondary market for bonds used to be a ‘second-hand market’—it offered investors the possibility of liquidating their positions should the need arise. Today, however, ‘the leading role of the secondary market cuts off the link which could relate the determination of interest rates to the availability of savings.’ The same thing applies to corporate equities, where the secondary market is in any case strongly influenced by events in the bond markets. Large corporations are no longer shielded from capital-market pressures by the presence of stable long-term majority stakeholders. Today the institutional investors do not necessarily hold more than 2 or 3 per cent of a company’s shares, but ‘they are able to exercise a determining influence over its top management’.8 Corporate leaderships were less concerned with fluctuations in their share price when a controlling block of shares was closely held by long-term investors with a strategic interest in the enterprise. Pension funds and investment companies today trade their share-holdings intensively and are usually open to the bids that would permit a takeover. To the extent that they intervene in company policy it is in order to maintain the value of the securities in their portfolios, not primarily to strengthen the enterprise. The upshot is a process of ‘pseudo-rational financial accumulation’, in which institutional investors buy at high prices in order to increase the worth of their existing holdings. Gréau’s critique of shareholder power will be familiar: 7

cmf, p. 210.

8

cmf, p. 208.

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During the twenty-five glorious years, company leaderships had to concern themselves above all with their customers, their workers and their competitors, only to a limited extent with their shareholders. In the aftermath of the financial revolution, they had to give all their attention to the shareholders, especially those privileged shareholders who are the pension funds. They still have to respond to the wishes of their customers and to the initiatives of their competitors, but only to a very limited extent to the aspirations of their workers.9

The biggest possible reduction in the number of employees and in the wage bill is one way to meet the demands of the shareholders. Of course, employers were always concerned to reduce wage costs; in the past, however, this goal was balanced by the attempt to increase market share and expand their enterprises. Shareholder pressures now tended to subordinate expansion to profitability. The upshot was wage stagnation, leading to depressed demand. Increasingly, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon economies, Gréau argues, household indebtedness became the principal motor for expanding demand. Since much household debt was set at variable rates, the effects of central banks’ adjustment of interest rates now had hugely amplified effects. By the mid-90s, Gréau argues, the policies that had been set in place to contain 70s stagflation risked producing a new monstrosity: stag-deflation. It is noteworthy that Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance puts much more emphasis on the spread of securitization than on financial globalization as such. Indeed, Gréau claims that ‘the transformation of the financial markets has not, despite proclamations to the contrary, led to their unification. They are still tied to specific financial sectors’. Though open to global investors, ‘the bond markets remain within the orbit of national economies’, their logic ‘dictated by internal inflation prospects and monetary-policy decisions’.10 Gréau gives some examples of divergence across securities markets, such as the Japanese stock-market bubble in the late 1980s. But the main securities markets are surely increasingly closely interlinked in terms of correlated price movements, with the same institutional investors present in all of them; a trend reinforced through vast transnational mergers, such as that between Euronext and the nyse. However, the assertion that national financial systems were still autonomous allowed Gréau to argue, in his closing chapter, that effective solutions still existed at the level of the European Union and even, to some extent, the individual country. 9

cmf, p. 210.

10

cmf, pp. 201, 304–5.

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41

The alternative to neoliberal ‘stag-deflation’, Gréau suggests, is ‘to prioritize productive labour’—‘economic, financial, social and moral reasons all point to the same conclusion’. To rely on ‘household debt alone’ to drive demand is clearly imprudent. The mal-distribution of income away from productive activity should be corrected, not by imposing direct controls over the financial sphere, but by re-linking wages to productivity. All employees, regardless of rank, should share in profits.11 Gréau concedes that globalization— in the form of ‘wage-dumping’—poses a problem of competitiveness. Nevertheless, he thinks that with a minimal protectionist shield at eu level, together with the development of continental-scale industries, remuneration could be re-linked to productivity, as during the ‘glorious twenty-five’. Macro-economic policy should become more expansionary, with the fight against inflation becoming ‘curative rather than preventative’.12 In this context, Gréau is particularly scathing about French adherence in the 1990s to the Bundesbank’s conditions for European monetary union: sustaining the over-valuation of the French currency in an effort to ‘keep the franc in the orbit of the deutschmark’ had cost the country a million jobs and a huge public debt. Astonishingly, the French authorities appeared to think that German manufacturing had conquered new markets because of the strong deutschmark, not in spite of it. But the German strategy of costcutting and subcontracting through ‘organic extension’ into ex-Communist central Europe—‘a growing part of German value-added comes from goods and services realized in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia’—was not open to France.13 Gréau’s critique of the economic basis of European monetary union in Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance deservedly won him a reputation for prescience: The new currency will not be viable unless and until the underlying economies have become so interlinked as to form a single economic entity, or unless a supranational mechanism for redistribution makes it possible to buffer at least some of the shocks which a unified monetary policy will not be able to avoid . . . To a completely wrong conception of the European project must be added the specific constraints resulting from the adoption of the German model of monetary management: serious difficulties can be foreseen and, perhaps, a catastrophic failure of monetary unification.14

The work ends with equally prescient warnings of coming instability. The American economy also has an Achilles heel: 11 13

cmf, p. 342. cmf, p. 354.

12 14

cmf, pp. 357, 361. cmf, p. 362.

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American households are once again over-indebted. The American expansion will end when households are no longer willing or able to roll over their debts . . . The moment is unforeseeable, but the brake on us domestic demand will affect Asian exports and share portfolios . . . A us slowdown could be the factor which triggers a new fall of the dollar with totally destabilizing consequences.15

Globalization’s discontents In 2005, Gréau’s L’Avenir du capitalisme offered a more wide-ranging assessment of the structural and institutional changes in contemporary capitalist systems, embracing not only financial processes but changes in the international division of labour and in relations among the main economies. The first chapter recalls Schumpeter’s judgement in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy—that, although materially capable of surmounting its crises, capitalism faced moral and social defeat from within, disavowed by the intellectuals, while bureaucrats defeated its entrepreneurs. By contrast, Gréau notes, the 21st century has seen the victory of the entrepreneur on every continent and the twilight of class struggle: ‘And yet, the triumph of the system coincides in a strange way with multiple and massive anomalies in its functioning’.16 Emergent economies had been subject to repeated crises—in the decade before L’Avenir du capitalisme was published, these had rocked Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, Brazil, Argentina. The super-competitive, exporting economies of Germany and Japan had failed to maintain employment. The ‘American patient’ had been suffering from economic slowdown since the high-tech crisis in 2000; worse, the us Treasury and the Federal Reserve had adopted expansionary policies at a time when household indebtedness and the external deficit would normally have called for restriction, with economists cheering on what looked like a flight forward into uncontrollable debts and deficits. ‘The American authorities, as though they had become hostages of the financial markets, turned to a massive stimulus of just the kind that encourages the behaviour leading to bubbles’.17 The us economy was threatened, it seemed, by risk of a genuine depression—not least due to the risks that had accumulated within its financial and real-estate markets: ‘American pensions are invested in the stock market; the 15

cmf, p. 382.

16

L’Avenir du capitalisme, p. 18; henceforth, ac.

17

ac, p. 23.

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43

real-estate market has mutated into a speculative market, parallel to the stock exchange: collapse in these two markets would be synonymous with the ruin of pensioners and the insolvency of home-owners.’18 The fragility at the heart of the American model was threatening the world economy as a whole. Japan and Germany were the most dependent on the situation in the us—‘the creditors have been captured by the debtor’.19 The American deficit was the symptom not only of huge quantitative imbalances but of a deliberately instituted qualitative dis­ equilibrium: the displacement of productive activities to China and other emergent economies amounted to deflation on a world scale—driven in this case not by a collapse of demand but by cost reductions. The us stock market, and the other financial markets operating on similar lines, drove these processes forward; the stock markets ‘no longer reinforcing the capital base of the quoted enterprises but methodically eroding it’.20 Gréau welcomes the corporate scandals at Enron and elsewhere that followed the bursting of the high-tech bubble: That the investors blessed by the law of shareholder value were on these occasions looted and robbed is, for us, not a source of concern but grounds for celebration and this for two reasons: firstly the satisfaction of seeing that aberrant systems which are based on injustice destroy themselves from within; secondly the pedagogic value of an experiment which shows that, in principle, the relations between capital and the enterprise cannot be those of a proprietor to a piece of property.21

Gréau sees the us economy as central to the general economic disorder. In this restatement of his position, he once again identifies the dangers of a reliance on household indebtedness to sustain economic activity. In the us, pressure to correct this internal imbalance is limited, because the reserve role of the dollar makes it possible to finance a widening current-account deficit, as economists increasingly recognized. But the profession usually ignored the role of the us deficit in driving down the cost of labour on a world scale, ‘a reduction directed along the rails of global free trade’.22 In L’Avenir du capitalisme it is the deflation of wages that is the central malfunction of the globalized economy (as distinct from ‘classical’ deflation, which follows a collapse of demand). The ultra-low interest rates maintained by the Fed after the high-tech crash—and closely imitated by the ecb and the Bank of England—kept 18 21

ac, p. 23. ac, pp. 45–6.

19 22

ac, p. 31. ac, p. 73.

20

ac, p. 37.

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classical deflation at bay by permitting over-indebted agents to refinance themselves very cheaply. But the us growth model based on household borrowing continued to undermine wages and employment conditions in the West, gradually creating a ‘structural under-payment of labour’.23 Gréau sees the rapid growth of Chinese and Indian exports as disastrous for workers in the West: ‘China offers to the enterprises of the world the immense reserve army which Marx thought he saw forming in the first industrial countries in Europe’. There is practically no manufactured good whose production cannot be displaced to China, nor any ‘intellectual’ service activity that cannot be entrusted to India, which offers ‘a second reserve army in the field of services that require a high level of technical and scientific competence’. The migration of complex service functions to India reveals the emptiness of that apologia for globalization that would see it recasting the international division of labour, so that the advanced capitalist countries export high-value services in exchange for Chinese manufactures. The adjustment for the West does not take the form of changing specializations but of unemployment, under-employment and falling wages. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party’s renunciation of its dogma is insignificant compared to ‘the renunciation of American and European labour by its traditional employers’.24 The arguments for global free trade are demolished one by one. It does not promote competition: most of the exports from China to the West are produced under the aegis of Western companies. Protection of Western economies would not necessarily reduce competition, provided outside companies were still free to invest and produce within them. Nor does free trade promote the development of the poorest, primaryproducing countries; it would rather ‘keep them in the undeclared status of colonies, producing cheap cotton to be turned into garments by Chinese or Indonesian helots’.25 The emergent economies do not need exports to the developed ones to finance their importation of capital goods—they are able to acquire modern producer goods from inward fdi. Cheap, imported consumer goods are not an effective alternative for wage increases in supporting the standard of living of Western workers, because the price reductions are at the same time deflating the value added by the workers themselves. ‘China worries me’, Madame de Guermantes remarks ‘with a serious air’, in À la recherche du temps 23

ac, p. 87.

24

ac, p. 101–3.

25

ac, p. 116.

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45

perdu. Gently mocking in its original context, the remark today encapsulates ‘one of the most crucial questions about the economic future of the world’.26 Western corporations’ abandonment of their home workforce is seen as part of a broader strategic shift, driven by the financial markets and the us state: The free-trade project resulted from a collective decision by the ruling elites of the developed countries, taken under the pressure from the financial markets, the big retail chains and the most powerful multinational groups, as well as at the political instigation of an America which included this trivial project for the exploitation of human resources in a wider and perhaps more candid project to bring backward populations into conformity with American economic and cultural norms.27

The globalization project cannot be dissociated from ‘the assumption of power by the financial markets’, Gréau concludes.28 The moral vacuity of the strategy is revealed in the vision of the ‘enterprise without workers’: with outsourcing taken to the limit, managers’ sole function will be as an interface between the market and the products’ suppliers. ‘The enterprise without workers will remain a fiction’, but the fantasy itself reveals ‘an underlying will to separate the firm from labour’.29 Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance had already described the 1997 Asian debacle as ‘a classic over-investment crisis’. L’Avenir du capitalisme also stresses the malfunctions brought about by the emergence of untrammelled global finance: Latin American countries becoming debt tributaries; the East Asian economies brought down by capital inflows of which they had no need: ‘The Asian crisis demonstrates in retrospect a mindless international finance, carried away by unreasonable hopes for capital gains’.30 But Gréau denies the need for supranational regulatory measures, such as a Tobin tax: Let us be careful not to see, in the proposal for general taxation of capital flows, anything other than one of the slogans displayed on an anti-capitalist demonstration. Of course, it feeds the imagination of the opponents of the global economy, but in so doing it gives support to the illusion of global regulation at just the point where it is surely necessary to reaffirm the principle 26 29

ac, p. 97. ac, p. 113.

27 30

ac, p. 101. ac, p. 149.

28

ac, p. 111.

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of the responsibility of nations and the principle, indissolubly linked to it, of national sovereignty.31

Gréau sharply distinguishes his critique from that of the alterglobalization movement, which he describes as ‘a mediatized, ersatz form of the workers’ movement of the past’—as ‘devoid of theoretical and practical thinking as the political movement behind global free trade is itself devoid of intellectual or moral objectives.’ His own programme, by contrast, is for a ‘rationalization of capitalism’ which would ‘permit the enterprise and competition to work in a more just and more efficient way’. Above all, he argues, there is ‘no example of successful development that is not based on a national will and a national vision’.32 The attempt to specify a reform programme that will rescue capitalism from the cul-de-sac of globalization begins with the question: what good do stock markets now do? Their classical role was to provide capital for quoted corporations; but with the new practice of share buy-backs, the flow of capital is often in the opposite direction. In an era when most investors were individuals, dispersed ownership of corporations was less of a problem; the rise of institutional investors, however, undermines the autonomy of the enterprise. It was under pressure from these fund managers, ‘paradoxically both powerful and prisoners of the market’, that the American stock exchange began to display the pathological symptoms of a closed system. This goes beyond ‘the practical interests of managers, accountants, analysts and bankers in seeing their forecasts converge to sustain a climate of optimism, favourable to their personal fortunes’. It lies in the more general character of the stock market itself, which does not operate according to the laws of equilibrium: ‘the supply of investment, represented by the purchase of securities, and the demand for investment represented by the issuance of securities, are disconnected’. A share’s value essentially lies in the hopes nourished for it by the psychology of the investors. In practice, it is the buyer, not the seller, who sets its price—and who does so in hopes that it will rise. The in-built risks of a bull market have been vastly amplified since the bourses fell into the hands of the big investment funds. ‘In contrast to individual shareholders who can enter or leave the market as they please, institutional investors are literally trapped inside it. Their objective 31

ac, pp. 153–4.

32

ac, pp. 17, 41, 154.

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47

dependence on the market pushes them to strive for ever-higher prices.’ To take account of negative information would be ‘to saw off the branch on which they are sitting’. L’Avenir du capitalisme concludes: ‘The big institutional investors make the market because they are the market. It is this closed system, impatient to achieve its target rates of return and, at bottom, rather indifferent to the economy itself, that is the true image of the stock market today.’33 Under its pressure, the strategies of the major corporations have become increasingly dysfunctional, as demonstrated by the exorbitant remuneration levels of their senior executives. Gréau argues for a reconciliation, although not a reintegration, of ownership and control for large corporations, so they may ‘fulfil their social functions’ in a rational, continuous manner.34 Profits should be seen as the income of the firm, not of capital. The Anglo-Saxon view that corporations are simply the property of the shareholders—displacing the ‘stakeholder’ orientation, previously seen in Japan and continental Europe—eliminates the key distinction between purely opportunistic shareholders and those with ongoing links to the enterprise. Institutional investors, who demand a say over corporate strategy but have no continuing connection to the corporation, represent a form of absentee ownership. The penetration of Anglo-Saxon institutional investors into other economies has destabilized previously existing relations between the firm and a dominant fraction of its capital, whether that took the form of ownership by a family, by a bank, by other industrial enterprises or by the management. The true role of the shareholder is to safeguard the independence of the enterprise: ‘What makes the shareholders necessary is not the risks they run but the risk against which they protect. In the absence of stable shareholders, the enterprise becomes the hostage of its partners’—of its creditors, its employees, its suppliers or its customers.35 But though Gréau speaks of the enterprise as having a ‘mission’ or an ‘objective in the public interest’, he does not make clear how this would be determined or altered. Yet the critiques of the stock market and of Anglo-Saxon finance are preliminary to that of the world-trade system that finance has promoted, and which L’Avenir du capitalisme sums up in the phrase: ‘globalization crushes employment.’ The policy proposals that Gréau now advances centre on the creation of large-scale—regional or continental—common 33

ac, pp. 178–9.

34

ac, p. 193.

35

ac, p. 195.

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markets, shielded by a novel form of protectionism. Under the aegis of a World Competition Organization, which would replace the wto, enterprises would be free to establish production facilities in other countries, in order to encourage competition on the basis of efficiency, product quality and innovation, but not to export into those countries, simply on the basis of cheap labour. This is a very unusual position: most advocates of trade protection would also favour rigorous controls over flows of foreign direct investment, on the grounds that it is much more intrusive to establish production facilities or to purchase a company in another country than to export goods to it. fdi leads to a much closer involvement in local employment systems, regulatory practices and tax structures than is implied by cross-border trade. But the originality of Gréau’s position does not make it illogical. He wants to protect the wages and conditions of employees, without protecting their employers from competition stemming from greater efficiency or higher product quality. His proposal amounts to a very strong labour clause, restricting the scope of free trade. The actual competitive superiority of an enterprise is to be tested by its ability to employ and remunerate the workers which its competition displaces. Other proposals are less original. Gréau calls for a decentralization of the international monetary system which would conform to both a reduction of inter-continental trade and a brake on the Americanization of financial systems—a kite first flown in Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance. At the level of the corporation, he argues for the removal of voting rights from those shares that are frequently traded. However, he gives some consideration to private equity as a means for stabilizing company strategies, which would seem incompatible with his overall vision. Private-equity investors certainly eliminate dispersed ownership, but the unified control they exercise is completely under the sign of the financial markets: the goal is to bring about, as rapidly as possible, an increase in the market value of the company that has been purchased. During the recent financial bubble, the vast sums poured into private-equity funds in pursuit of leverage finally undermined the financial structure as a whole. L’Avenir du capitalisme opened with Schumpeter; it closes with Polanyi and Braudel, setting the recent ‘transformation’ of the world capitalist economy in a longer-term perspective. Rejecting a globalization process that would call the role of nation-states into question, Gréau returns to the historical roots of the capitalist economy, which he locates, firstly, in

grahl: Gréau

49

a transformation of relations between northern European cities and their contiguous rural areas, tending towards relations based on exchange rather than the cities’ predatory power. The next step, decisively inaugurating the capitalist era, was the formation of national markets within nation-states. This vision leads to a critique of Braudel, who emphasized the role of long-distance trade: One cannot imagine a clearer logical opposition than that between the choice of productivity which implies, for the economic agents who strive for it, the hope of seeing their efficiency freely recognized by their customers, and the choice of predation, which amounts to imposing an unjustified advantage, resulting from a position of strength, within economic relations. Yet [the confusion of the two] is the tour de force achieved by Fernand Braudel, whose writings have unfortunately contributed to a persistent misunderstanding of the true nature of capitalism and, more unhappily still, to a distortion of the decisive step in the economic transformation of Europe which the formation of national markets represents.36

The same emphasis on the role of the nation-state informs Gréau’s condemnation of the discourse of globalization, which would subordinate national development programmes to ‘a new pseudo-model in the shape of contemporary America’. He recognizes many strengths in the us economy, not least certain social conditions favourable to expansion and employment: ‘nowhere else does the launch of a new project receive as favourable a spontaneous reception or such active support from the economic environment’. 37 Other aspects are more debatable, including ‘the unconditional support for financial markets by the public authorities’ and the ‘growing contrast between the wealthy strata and the mass of indebted Americans’. L’Avenir du capitalisme concludes: Although the future belongs to capitalism, on condition that it overcomes the material contradictions which threaten its equilibrium, it belongs also to all those nations which have adopted its essential principles. No nation has the right to impose its future on capitalism.38

Treachery on high Gréau’s most recent work, La Trahison des économistes, has a narrower focus, being a critique of neoliberal economics, especially in France; but it is particularly useful in that it was written after the outbreak of the sub-prime crisis and therefore summarizes his responses to that event. 36

ac, p. 282.

37

ac, p. 291.

38

ac, p. 299.

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The allusion to Julien Benda’s great work is justified by the scandalous abandonment of critical responsibilities that Gréau finds among the apologists for neoliberal positions; but his reproach is slightly different to Benda’s. La Trahison des clercs accused French intellectuals of betraying their ‘clerical’ function, defined positively as the service of objective truth. Gréau here accuses the economists and economic commentators of constituting a clergy—a priesthood, in the service of the neoliberal project. It may seem surprising that it is French economists who are accused of a slavish adhesion to neoliberal orthodoxy. Gréau acknowledges the presence of heterodox positions in the universities: old-style liberals, unrepentant Keynesians, original research projects undertaken in the spirit of Schumpeter or Marx. But ‘an undeclared ostracism denies them access to the media and, in consequence, to the microcosm of political decision-makers, because the selection of the best minds depends on the media’.39 Repeated protests from economists in France attest to the reality of this exclusion. There have been recent movements against ‘autistic economics’ and the dominance of an economic pensée unique. A 70-page manifesto by ‘dismayed economists’ has been a major success.40 Yet as Gréau says, only neoliberal economists have the privilege of declaring essential truths to the French political class, ‘transfixed—médusée—by the accomplishments of the new globalized economy’.41 His examples of issues effectively blocked from debate by the priesthood will be familiar to Anglosphere readers. Thus: all responsibility for the financial debacle is attributed to individual misdeeds—‘in new-age capitalism, certain actors may be fraudulent but the markets themselves are innocent’. Despite the increasing dependence on borrowing by heavily indebted households in the us, no general problem of aggregate demand in the world economy is recognized; and commentators continue to assert the mutual benefits of the new international division of labour, in spite of its predatory effects.42 La Trahison des économistes consists of five chapters, each identifying a neoliberal position, putting forward a critique and drawing policy conclusions. ‘How to be attractive and competitive?’ asserts Gréau’s central protectionist position: competition from low-wage economies is now La Trahison des économistes, p. 6; henceforth, te. Philippe Askenazy, Thomas Coutrot, André Orléan, Henri Sterdyniak et al, Manifeste d’économistes atterrés. Crises et dettes en Europe: 10 fausses évidences, 22 mesures en débat pour sortier de l’impasse, Paris 2010. 42 41 te, p. 11. te, p. 7. 39

40

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so fierce and embraces such a wide range of products that there is no effective way of maintaining the competitiveness of European economies: The comparative advantage that the developed countries acquired by being the first in history to carry out scientific and economic development is a thing of the past, or is rapidly becoming so. The new economic world presents itself as a world of competition across all goods and services that can be traded internationally. Alas, it is also a world where competition is more and more unequal in that, on the one hand, the former beneficiaries of development are burdened by costs of production and of state activity that cannot be drastically reduced without depressing domestic demand and breaking social cohesion; and on the other, the efficiency gains of the newly promoted economies are not balanced, nor about to be, by a comparable advance in the living standards of their populations.43

Gréau again advocates a form of protection that would permit any enterprise to contest European markets via fdi; this would exclude competition on the basis of low wages, while encouraging it when based on genuinely higher productivity. At the same time financial protection for French and European enterprises should be based on the issue of nonvoting shares to institutional investors, which would limit shareholder pressure on corporate strategy—pressure which, in Gréau’s view, has encouraged the relocation of Western manufacturing to China. The complacency with which neoliberal orthodoxy regards the decline of manufacturing in Western economies is challenged in the next chapter, ‘Post-industrial or hyper-industrial society?’. Although industrial production today provides less direct employment, it remains central to technological advance and is closely tied to many high-value service activities, threatened by its emigration to the emerging economies. The growth of services represents not ‘a bifurcation of the competitive economic system’, but rather ‘a deepening of industrial society’, a development that Gréau associates with increasingly active and autonomous consumers.44 La Trahison des économistes then turns to the Hexagon: ‘Is France ruined?’ The destabilization of French public finance is traced primarily to the preparations for monetary union in the 1990s, involving a long period of currency overvaluation. However, the French public debt is held primarily within France, which remains a net creditor in international terms; there is thus still scope for autonomous policies to correct the situation. Nevertheless, ‘we have begun to pay a veritable 43

te, p. 61.

44

te, p. 110.

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economic tribute to globalization’ which will ‘expose us to a national bankruptcy, properly so called, if it is aggravated by the failure to establish a commercial policy to protect the whole European economy’.45 In a stylized presentation of his analysis, Gréau postulates three economic spheres: the first is the productive economy; the second consists of primary finance, closely tied to the first; the third consists essentially of secondary markets for securities and is a world of speculation. The third sphere has expanded relentlessly with the disintermediation and securitization of bank credits: ‘The most left-wing mayor of London will not utter a word against the effervescent activities that occupy the population of the Square Mile. The City of London and its region, perhaps even the whole of England, have become economic tributaries of the third sphere.’46 Central banks themselves have been ‘taken hostage’ by the securities markets, not daring to limit the growth of speculation for fear of provoking crisis and collapse. A prescient section, ‘Rebirth of capital or triumph of credit?’, describes the transformation of us real-estate finance into a field of security-market speculation. As in L’Avenir du capitalisme, Gréau sees some possibility that private equity, closely involved in company management, can counteract the influence of absentee shareholders. But here the discussion is more nuanced: private equity can only play a positive role when it engages with productive strategies and avoids burdening its target enterprises with debt. Finally, a reflection on capitalist competition attempts to present a more concrete and realistic account of the process than that found in economics text-books. A critical account of electricity deregulation in the us suggests that the upshot was not so much effective competition as a series of captive markets. The competition that Gréau sees as essential is between enterprises, whose continual struggle for market share implies the permanent rationalization and reorganization of the production process, under the sanction of autonomous consumers. Chamberlin’s monopolistic competition and Schumpeter’s account of innovation are better guides than the price competition of standard theory. La Trahison des économistes closes with a call to ‘put an end’ to neoliberalism, given the exhaustion of the Anglo-American model. Politicians and financiers had intended to put the economy back onto a healthy basis 45

te, p. 134.

46

te, p. 153.

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53

of capital and risk. In reality, the system they established depended on the subordination of monetary and credit policies to the requirements of deregulated finance: ‘The monstrous originality of the new capitalist world lies in its being given over to a neoliberal experiment, shaped by a traditional ideology, with the instruments inherited from the Keynesian period.’47 In spite of his distaste for high levels of public expenditure, Gréau praises the Swedish exception: the Swedes have shielded their enterprises from shareholder pressure and the country trades more with its traditional partners than with the emerging economies. Swedish banks have avoided disintermediation and, above all, the Swedes have stayed out of the Eurozone. Gréau argues for a programme at eu level to define a new path of economic development. He recognizes that the present European Commission is hardly in a position to undertake this task: European institutions have been invaded by the representatives and disciples of the Anglo-American model to the point that some eu functionaries have been trying to outbid the Americans and the English in ideological terms. We have to recognize that the main obstacle to be surmounted lies in this implicit denial by Europe of its own character, its economic and financial traditions and, above all, its political will.48

But Gréau suggests that this situation is due to a kind of abdication by the member states, rather than their usurpation by the Commission and the Court of Justice. It remains possible for member states to define a common political project that would have priority over the rules of competition through which, at present, neoliberal strategies are enforced. The programme he invokes is as much social and cultural as economic. Its first principle is demographic—policies aimed at lifting the ‘suicidal threat’ posed by low levels of fertility in the context of increased life expectancy. The second would be to end the subordination of education to employment. A protectionist commercial policy is the third principle; the promotion of exchange-rate stability, especially vis-à-vis major currencies such as the dollar, the fourth. Next comes a reassertion of the rights of the enterprise against those of the shareholders, with lower taxes on stable long-run shareholdings than those that are frequently traded. The security and autonomy of Europe’s food and energy supplies is the sixth proposal and, finally, a 47

te, p. 222–3.

48

te, p. 253.

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rigorous ecological policy, including carbon and other pollution taxes to help finance common projects.49

Assessment Gréau makes a powerful presentation of his case. Two aspects of his political position should be taken into account. There is firstly his commitment to capitalist competition between enterprises as the source of economic progress: he has nevertheless moved a long way since he was economist to the French employers’ association. Secondly, there is his rejection of supranational authorities: like many in France, including economists well to his left such as Jacques Sapir, he is a souveraintiste and sees the form of the nation state as of primary economic importance. Here too, however, his views are not simplistic. He dismisses for example, De Gaulle’s attempts to restore the gold standard as completely contrary to the need for an elastic credit supply both in France itself and more generally. Again, although he rejects the supranational pretensions of the eu, his political programme is laid out, as has been seen, in European rather than narrowly French terms. Apart from a few sallies at the expense of ‘ultracritical’ opponents of global capitalism, this is in no way a tendentious work. In many respects it coincides with accounts of financialization and globalization from Marxist and other heterodox economists. For this reason the critical remarks which follow are directed not only at Gréau but at certain positions found very widely in current debates. They concern the impact of globalization on Western workforces and the role of finance in current economic developments. Gréau is surely correct to identify a process of ‘wage deflation’ in the advanced economies, but he ties this too closely to the emergence of China and other low-wage producers onto world markets. This raises problems of timing: the assault on wages, working conditions and social protection in Western economies had already begun before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms could have any effect. The assault had many dimensions but, as Dani Rodrik has argued, one of the most important was simply the new mobility of productive capital. This put workforces into competition with each other even in the absence of big relocations to developing countries. One of the earliest and most destructive capital migrations took place within the us itself: the move to the Sun Belt, 49

te, p. 240–5.

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which had devastating consequences for the industrial economies of the Midwest and the Northeast seaboard. This point of detail relates to one of analysis. Gréau wants to argue that the initiatives leading to globalized economic relations were discontinuous with accumulation processes within Western economies during the ‘glorious’ post-war decades. The counter-example of capital migration within the us itself suggests that the two phases share a common economic logic. The same is true in Western Europe (where the rapid growth of productivity associated with a catch-up, after decades in which war, depression and instability had held back investment, also needs to be considered). Both the post-war expansion in Northern Europe and the economic restructuring which followed its exhaustion overstepped national boundaries. The expansion was dependent on urbanization processes; by the late 1950s these had become international, as labour was drawn from the Mediterranean, North Africa and further afield. The drive to contain labour costs that began to dominate German investment patterns from the 1970s had both domestic and international aspects: the rapid automation of many production processes and a move up-market to more specialized industrial products at home were accompanied by the multinationalization of German corporations, with investment flowing first towards its Northern European neighbours, then to Southern Europe and finally on an intercontinental scale. All of these moves, not just the last, posed problems for German workers. In effect, the post-war expansion in Europe depended on an elastic supply of labour. The tightening of labour markets in the late 1960s and into the 70s, and the decline in profitability to which it was linked, triggered a vast, and increasingly radical, restructuring process that worked to undermine the established position of labour. This is not to deny the normative importance of many features of the post-war period, nor the dysfunctional character of many of the so-called ‘reforms’ which followed. But the stagflation of the 1970s signalled deeper problems than a disordered exchange-rate system or laxity in public finances. The vast over-accumulation that brought the expansion to an end, and the deep restructuring it provoked, can themselves be seen as processes typical of capitalist dynamics, rather than as departures from its normal pattern of development. As to foreign investment, even today the majority of fdi flows are from one advanced economy to another. The consequences for labour can still be severe, simply because of the freedom of manoeuvre

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that this mobility confers on capital. This is not to deny the very sharp problems posed by imports from low-wage countries; but one limitation of Gréau’s argument for protection is that he considers only the defence of Western employment relations and does not discuss how the interests of Chinese or Indian workers could be secured in such a context. Like Gréau, many critics of globalization regard the process as the outcome of a conscious political, or political-financial project. Of course, any major economic development today has political preconditions and requires negotiation between legislators and interest groups, the installation of new regulatory structures, the redefinition of property rights and so on. But this very visible political accompaniment does not mean that the processes involved have no economic logic. Globalization is surely, among many other things, a new phase in the socialization of production. One can very reasonably object that this is a very antisocial socialization—but when was that not the case? There is every justification for Gréau’s critique of finance, which converges with that of many other commentators.50 The predation, speculation, deception and irrationality that he depicts are real and have been confirmed, in the most destructive ways, by the sub-prime debacle and its aftermath. But it seems exaggerated to suggest that it was largely pressure from the financial markets that promoted the vast shift of industrial production towards emerging economies: the big Western corporations were heavily involved in international relocations prior to the financial transformations of the last twenty-five years. Two analytical points will be linked to this observation. The first concerns the distinction between bank credit and security-based finance. Many critical observers of contemporary finance—critical of its hypertrophy, its parasitism, its instability—speak as though the central failure of the financial system relates to the substitution of marketable securities for bank loans in forms of credit provision. They frequently contrast the supposedly patient support for their industrial customers from German Hausbanken with the excessive demands and short-term preoccupations of the shareholding funds that scrutinize the quarterly reports of us or British corporations. Too much weight should not be placed See, for example, the dramatic account by Robert Fitch of the impact of financialization on New York, ‘Explaining New York City’s Aberrant Economy’, nlr i/207, September–October 1994. 50

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on this distinction, which concerns, at bottom, two forms of maturity transformation—two types of exit from a financial relationship. If the user of funds wants them for a long period, but the supplier may require them back sooner, then the gap can be closed either by reliance on a strong institution—a bank—which aggregates its credits and deposits, so as to preserve the liquidity of the latter; or by making the investor’s claim marketable, so that another investor can take it over and provide an early return of the funds committed. These two forms have co-existed, in close symbiosis, since the beginnings of industrial capitalism. Early forms of credit were very closely tied to exchange: late payment for a transaction represented a credit from the seller to the buyer, prepayment the reverse. As finance became a separate social function, both modern forms developed simultaneously: trade credits were made negotiable and thus took the form of marketable securities; what became the banks were originally merely the strongest participants in that market. Both forms of credit may work in a stable and efficient way. Both can fail, misallocating investment resources within individual credit transactions or provoking widespread crises. Since banks have always been major players on securities markets, it is hard to argue that a narrower role for the latter and a wider use of classical bank credit would itself make for more stability and rationality in the financial sphere. In the case of the us sub-prime mortgage fiasco, for example, the possibility of issuing marketable securities backed by the mortgages was certainly central to the whole process. But the crisis itself was greatly aggravated by the banks’ failure in practice to sell these securities on a large enough scale across the financial system; they often stayed with the issuing banks, trapped in the ‘conduits,’ and therefore immediately compromising the banks when their value was called into question. The development of an international financial system in recent decades has involved a great deal of disintermediation and securitization. (These terms are roughly synonymous but, strictly speaking, the first denotes the general replacement of bank credit by security markets; the second, the transformation of a specific set of bank credits into securities.) Many see this as representing in itself a kind of decadence in financial relations, but it is also possible to interpret it in terms of scale: whereas banks may be more effective than security markets in the detailed monitoring of specific credit relationships, the markets are

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better able to draw funds from dispersed investors on a continental or global scale and to transmit them to different enterprises, sectors and national economies. Security markets were always more important in the us than in individual European countries, in part due to the continental scale of the us economy. There is hardly any doubt that one consequence of the recent financial crash will be to accelerate the growth of securities markets—not at the expense of the banks, which will remain the main actors in these markets, but at the expense of classical bank intermediation. Even the limited moves so far agreed to restrain and re-regulate the banks—for example, by requiring them to raise more equity capital or to declare more of their assets on their balance sheets—will tend to make bank credit more expensive relative to security-based finance, which can therefore be expected to continue its growth within a global financial system which, pace Gréau and many others, is becoming more integrated and interdependent as a consequence of the crisis. The second analytical point concerns the nature of finance. Obviously, finance is an interest, or a closely coherent set of interests. As such it is extremely powerful and dangerous. But finance is also a function. Indeed from the point of view of heterodox economic traditions, whether Keynesian or Marxist, it is an indispensable function. Heterodox economists recognize that markets do not clear. The normal working of commodity exchange distributes surpluses and deficits across the economy in a complex and largely unpredictable way. Only the ceaseless recycling of monetary resources then permits the deficit units to survive, and thus the capitalist economy to continue. Those mainstream economists who believe in the spontaneous equilibration of the market may regard the financial system as merely a lubricant of market exchange; those without this Panglossian assurance have to regard finance as the market’s condition of existence. A highly internationalized and interdependent economy requires a complex international financial system. Long before the neoliberal agenda was promulgated, the first was giving rise to the second: the emergence and development of the Eurodollar banking and security-trading system, the embryo of today’s global finance, were essentially consequences of the multinational activities of the big us corporations. The density of the interconnections among financial systems today is still often

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underestimated. For example, the Eurozone and us money markets form an integrated whole, in which liquidity flows smoothly across the two currency zones. The malfunctions of the global financial system and the injustice with which it distributes its massive revenues pose very acute problems of social control, both over financial interest groups—if they are to be subordinated to general, democratically determined interests—and over the financial function, if it is to help fulfil social and environmental priorities. The struggle for such control faces an acute dilemma: the aim must be a deep reform of international structures, but the only feasible starting points seem to be from within national polities, themselves tightly constrained in their external relations. Gréau’s more recent writings show increasing awareness of the dilemma. Beyond its analytical interest, the importance of his work lies, precisely, in combining a radical critique of contemporary capitalism with a radical reform agenda. He continues to see political initiatives in France as the necessary starting point, but formulates his programme in European terms. Speaking of his proposals for banking reform he asks: But on what territory can one envisage the implementation of such measures? The whole world, the Western world, the European Union, the nation? Since I cannot imagine the Chinese or Indian leaderships, nor Barack Obama, nor the British prime minister, present or future, adopting such proposals, because of the nationalism of the first two and the subordination of the second two to their banking sectors; and since the banks operating in France relate firstly to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, it seems to be the territory of the Eurozone which must be the base of the new organization. But we are subjected to the Treaty of Maastricht, based on a doctrinaire vision of money and banking completely opposed to the one we have advocated . . . To overcome these illusions and build a different banking system will require a revolution in the heads of the political leaders of the Old Continent. A vast programme.51

With Gréau’s last sentence, one can only concur.

Jean-Luc Gréau, ‘Pour un nouveau système bancaire’, Le Débat, November– December 2009. 51

chin-tao wu

S C A R S A N D F AU LT L I N E S The Art of Doris Salcedo

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s in any public square in a Western European city on a sunny day, people casually gather and stroll around the Plaza de Bolívar, the central square of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá.1 The imposing façades of the grandiose colonial buildings that flank the square add to its monumentality and tranquillity. One could easily mistake it for St Mark’s in Venice. But the Plaza de Bolívar is no urban arcadia: it is under constant surveillance and policed by an alarming number of soldiers armed with submachine guns. Their presence not only reflects the continuing militarization of the country’s civic life, but also recalls the Plaza’s specific role in its troubled history. In November 1985, the Palace of Justice on its northern side was the scene of one of the most notorious confrontations between the Colombian Army and the country’s leftist insurgents. On November 6th, with negotiations fraying between the Betancur government and the guerrillas—farc, M-19, eln—amid rising Army and paramilitary violence, 35 M-19 guerrillas seized the Supreme Court ‘in the name of peace and social justice’, demanding that Betancur come and negotiate with them. The Army took charge and, ignoring pleas from hostages, launched an all-out assault, firing heavy artillery at the building. When a conflagration broke out, the military forbade the firefighters to tackle the blaze. By the next morning the Palace of Justice was in ruins, the bodies of guerrillas and civilians alike often charred beyond recognition. Over a hundred people had died. Exactly seventeen years after the guerrillas had first entered the building— at precisely 11.25am on November 6th, 2002—an empty wooden chair appeared on top of the now rebuilt Palace of Justice and began slowly new left review 69 may jun 2011

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making its way down the high stone façade. It was followed by another chair, then another; before too long, a dozen chairs were descending; then several dozen more. Over the course of November 6th and 7th, some 280 chairs made the descent, ending at the exact time that the Army had finally taken the ruined building. The simple wooden chairs were all used ones, many aged with the imprint of the passing years. Everyday objects, they evoked the absence of those no longer sitting on them, and their slow-motion cascade down the side of the building prompted images of people hoping to escape to safety. This uncanny commemoration was, in fact, a work by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who has consistently sought to keep events such as the Palace siege—events that the West, as well as many in Colombia, would be happier to ignore, if not to forget—alive in people’s memories and the public consciousness. As an artist whose work has, since the 1990s, rarely been exhibited in her home country, Salcedo’s representation of the victims of Colombia’s undeclared civil wars raises important questions about its reception and consumption in the West: not only in public art museums but also in the commercial markets that trade in, and on, her art. Although it is not usual for art criticism to engage with the market side of artistic output, it is nevertheless important to see that art and commerce are in an intricate, and often opaque, symbiotic relationship. The friction generated by this conflict of interest is particularly acute for an artist whose work is politically orientated, and which articulates human violence and suffering. The bipartite nature of this essay is intended to highlight both the contradictory nature of today’s art industry and the sorts of dilemma that a politically engaged artist living in both the artistic and the commercial worlds might have to face, in order to function within them. Taking as examples those of Salcedo’s works directly inspired by the 1985 assault on the Palace of Justice, I will investigate how the reception of her art in the us and Europe might be typical of the way in which the Western art world habitually consumes and appropriates works from the ‘Third World’. Shibboleth—Salcedo’s renowned ‘crack in the floor’ of the prestigious Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2007—further illuminates the ways in I would like to express my gratitude to all those who were kind and co-operative enough to speak to me, but the requirements of anonymity prevent me from acknowledging their contribution more explicitly.

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Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7, Bogotá, Colombia, 2002. © The artist, courtesy White Cube.

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which ‘Third World’ artists can be accommodated and consumed within a predominantly Western cultural discourse. This is not, of course, to argue that Salcedo is typical: no Latin American artist has achieved what she has so far achieved in so short a time in such high-powered Western art institutions, public as well as commercial.2 Nevertheless, her interaction with Western art institutions provides an illuminating example of how it is possible for an artist operating between two worlds to negotiate and successfully secure for herself a position of cultural prominence. The intricate networking and social-relationship mechanisms within the contemporary art world are not easily mapped; but it may be possible to sketch out some significant historical junctures at which certain key players or institutions have helped shape an artist’s career.

Trajectory One of many ‘Third World’ artists who go to us or European centres of contemporary art for training, Salcedo completed her postgraduate studies in New York—an experience which not only provides graduates with opportunities for further professional development, but frequently also facilitates personal networking and access to Western art institutions in general. Having finished her Masters degree in sculpture at nyu in 1984, Salcedo returned to Colombia, and mainly exhibited in Bogotá for the next eight years.3 Her début in a Western art institution came with the group show Currents 92: The Absent Body at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1992. The following year Salcedo appeared in a group show at one of the foremost New York commercial art galleries, Brooke Alexander, and also featured in a special section of the 45th Venice Biennale—arguably the largest gathering of art specialists anywhere—which placed her work on the world art stage for the first time. It did not take long for Salcedo to be awarded her first solo show, La Casa Viuda (The Widowed House), at the Brooke Alexander Gallery in Other prominent Latin American artists either achieved success later in their careers—for example, the Brazilian Cildo Meireles was ten years older than Salcedo by the time of his 2008 Tate exhibition—or have yet to match commercial success with institutional recognition: the Mexican Teresa Margolles, though she has exhibited in many important venues, has yet to make it into any major Western art museum. 3 Biographical data from Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo and Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, London 2000. 2

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New York in 1994; this was to be followed by another solo show at White Cube in London in 1995, Doris Salcedo: La Casa Viuda VI. These successive exhibitions in New York and London indicate that Salcedo had secured a solid bridgehead in the commercial art world. Further exposure on the international scene came with the Carnegie International in 1995, the São Paulo Biennial in 1998, and the first Liverpool Biennial the following year. The late 1990s then brought three solo shows at some of the most prominent Western art museums: Unland/Doris Salcedo at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1998, travelling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999; and Art Now 18: Doris Salcedo at the then Tate Gallery in London in 1999. Despite occupying a small and somewhat remote space within the gallery, the Art Now series, devoted exclusively to younger and emerging artists, represents an important venue to showcase new talent. Entering the Tate collection must have been a turning point in Salcedo’s career, especially given the strong support of its director, Sir Nicholas Serota. Within the space of a few years, she was to be selected by Serota and his colleagues for the 2007 Turbine Hall commission. By the end of the 1990s, then, Salcedo was already well established in the Western art world, both on the commercial market and within the public art sector, moving back and forth between the two with ease. Despite working in the us, uk and Europe, Salcedo has, notably, chosen to continue living in her home city. This is in stark contrast to many other contemporary artists born outside Western Europe and North America, who have chosen to emigrate to one of these two areas in order to further their careers.4 In this sense, Salcedo’s career is untypical as far as ‘Third World’ artists are concerned. She is also unique in the way in which she has so far chosen to work: in comparison with the majority of artists of her generation, she has produced very little in terms of quantity. Each of her works is a unique piece, and it is not her habit to work in editions. Since 2000, there has been a significant shift in her working methods: she has mainly done site-specific, public projects which in practical terms may not be saleable. Moreover, though it is usual practice, in such circumstances, for artists to put their working drawings or sketches on the market, Salcedo has not so far sold any sketches.5 Given that a large See my ‘Biennials sans frontières’, nlr 57, May–June 2009. When asked if Salcedo would sell her working drawings, her New York agent replied: ‘Actually she doesn’t do drawings. She sketches in some notebooks, but she doesn’t do drawings. It’s just not part of her work.’ Interview with Carolyn Alexander, 18 October 2010. 4 5

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number of her works from the 1990s have entered public collections, there are very few pieces left to circulate in the market—leaving demand for her work high and constantly unsatisfied. How this situation is likely to develop is something to which we shall later return. But first we must take a closer look at Salcedo’s output, the better to understand why her work is so sought after, and what makes her specific contribution to contemporary art so original.

Memorials Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Salcedo based all of her work on first-hand evidence she collected during many field trips into the countryside of her native land, to abandoned villages and sites of mass graves and wholesale slaughter. Although the civil war as such has never been officially declared in Colombia, the country has been constantly torn by violence from an array of armed actors: the Army, para­militaries, drug barons and guerrillas. Employing, indeed recycling, personal domestic objects used by the victims of the conflict themselves, Salcedo makes these scraps and fragments from everyday life speak for the absent body and the missing person, as well as communicating the pain and sorrow that absence brings with it.6 In one of her most famous installations, Atrabiliarios (1991–96)—from the Latin for ‘black bile’, connoting the melancholy of mourning—worn shoes, mostly from female victims, are placed in box-like niches inserted directly into walls. The niches’ fronts are sealed with translucent animal fibre, tightly stretched and stitched with surgical thread. The used shoes, standing in a synecdochic relationship to their absent owners, are the sewn-up memories that the survivors must carry around with them. In La Casa Viuda (The Widowed House), a series of five works made between 1992 and 1995, used doors and other domestic furniture such as bed frames and stools have bones, zippers and fragments of clothes inserted into them. The title of the work already evokes the image of a bereaved woman alone with her grief. The insertion of human traces into the furniture further works to strengthen the visual complexity of the object—the intimacy of the zippers and fragments of personal Salcedo has said that some 20 to 30 per cent of the objects she has used in her work were collected from the victims. Interview with the author, Istanbul, 20 September 2003.

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clothing, interwoven with the domesticity of used objects, inevitably invites association with their absent owners. But in Salcedo’s work, such emotional associations are always carefully controlled; indeed, the potency lies in the ambiguity and understatement of the representation. In these works, Salcedo set out to identify with, and substitute herself for, the victims. As she herself stated: I try to learn absolutely everything about their lives, their trajectories, as if I were a detective piecing together the scene of a crime. I become aware of all the details in their lives. I can’t really describe what happens to me because it’s not rational: in a way, I become that person; there is a process of substitution.7

In cases where objects are, as it were, imprinted with their previous owners, the metonymic substitution might be easier to imagine and to sustain. But for the works related to the events at the Palace of Justice in 1985, Salcedo was forced to abandon her previous practice of employing objects actually owned and used by the victims. Forced, that is, both by practical considerations—the government refused to allow her to use any object preserved from the building8—and by the need to ensure the survival of the collective memory of the tragic events that had shaken an already traumatized country. In her own eloquent essay on Noviembre 6 y 7, she writes: ‘There is an overriding necessity for us to understand our past’—indeed, ‘the fundamental activity of an artist in periods of crisis is to elaborate images that make it possible to articulate a cultural memory based in collective knowledge of the past’. To this end, Salcedo evokes the concept of ‘active memory’: An active memory presupposes two operations: recalling and narrating. To recall is to make a deliberate effort of memory, but . . . if we limit remembering to this, without the capacity to narrate, we make it an isolated experience: the traumatized victim remembers in solitude. When memory becomes a narrative act, it seeks out an interlocutor and in this way transforms itself into social or collective memory. Active remembering is, therefore, above all a narration. The artist is an agent of memory, a narrator who invokes difficult historical moments that the country tries to forget.9 ‘Carlos Basualdo in conversation with Doris Salcedo’, in Princenthal, Doris Salcedo, p. 14. 8 Interview with the author, 18 February 2003, Bogotá. 9 Doris Salcedo, ‘Un Acto de Memoria’, dc, December 2002, no. 9; with thanks to Tim Girven for the translation. 7

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So far Salcedo has produced two major works about the assault on the Palace of Justice. The first, Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, was exhibited for the first time at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2001, and then in Documenta 11 at Kassel in 2002. As with Noviembre 6 y 7, chairs supplied the central metaphor. In Tenebrae—literally, ‘shadows’—an entire room is blocked off with elongated rods and upturned metal chairs. Closer inspection reveals that what appear to be metal studs, preventing visitors from approaching the work, are in fact chair legs. The ambiguity of the relationship between the chairs, their legs and the space thus defined and blocked off is a function of the (post-)minimal sculptural language that Salcedo chooses to use. Abstract though the work is, some sense of violence does in fact emanate from it; this effect is confirmed, or perhaps even strengthened, by several pieces of crushed chairs placed outside the room (Noviembre 6), an installation which was further expanded in the Documenta exhibition. Like those inside the room, these chairs are made of stainless steel, lead, wood and resin, but they have been violently crushed together by some unspecified force. Some of them are, like a battered body, heavily disfigured and barely recognizable as chairs. Although the brutality inflicted on the chairs is clear, to what extent can the minimal abstraction of the pieces represent the specific content implied by their dated titles? How far can these chairs be made to relate to the experience of the Colombian people, especially in the eyes of a Western audience? Over the past decade, despite her growing international reputation, Salcedo has seldom exhibited inside Colombia. With the important exception of the 2002 Palace of Justice installation, Salcedo’s works—even if not deliberately designed for exhibition and consumption in the West—have so far mostly been seen only outside the social context that actually inspired them. Given this decontextualization, it is striking that interpretations of Salcedo’s work in the West, critical or otherwise, are always coloured by an emphasis on the fact that she is from Colombia and that her work deals with the situation in that country—an emphasis, it must be said, partly of Salcedo’s own making and of which she herself is very much aware.10 Viewing these works in a Western art-gallery space raises, therefore, some particular problems. Encountering the works without any prior 10

Interview with the author, 18 February 2003, Bogotá.

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knowledge of the artist or her past compositions is an entirely different experience from that of someone who knows something of her Colombian background. Complicating matters further are differences in the actual viewing contexts. One need only, for instance, compare the divergent responses elicited by the shows at the Camden Arts Centre and at Kassel. Visitors to the former tend to be regular gallery-goers and are perhaps more likely to possess prior knowledge of Salcedo and her work. In this ‘white cube’ gallery environment the works occupied the whole space, giving the visitor a more concentrated, if not controlled, atmosphere for contemplation. In contrast, at the Fridericianum Museum at Kassel, Salcedo’s work was shown in a huge room which it shared with the works of Leon Golub. The magnitude of the space made Tenebrae and its accompanying installation look quite lost. The nature of Documenta—an art spectacle showing hundreds of works by hundreds of different artists, with thousands of visitors crowding into the exhibition space—prevented any specifically Colombian reading of Salcedo’s work (something, incidentally, that appalled the artist herself). If the specific political context of Salcedo’s work might thus sometimes be lost on its Western audience, quite the opposite is true in her homeland. In her Palace of Justice installation, Noviembre 6 y 7, Salcedo chose the time and actual location to make her act of remembrance.11 In Tenebrae the distortion of the chairs, upturned and with their grotesquely extended limbs, served as an additional reminder of the torture undergone by those who might have sat on them. In Noviembre 6 y 7, the empty chairs descending the façade of the Palace of Justice starkly conveyed the absence of the people who should have been sitting on them, rather than the traumatic experience itself. By hanging these banal yet intimate domestic objects against an outside wall, Salcedo was effectively turning the building inside out, adding a further unsettling note. ‘The work To date, Salcedo has undertaken two other public commemorative acts. First, when the political satirist and peace activist Jaime Garzón—who famously negotiated hostage releases with the farc—was killed by paramilitaries in 1999, Salcedo, together with other artists, placed 5,000 red roses along a 150-metre-long wall near where he lived. However, Salcedo stated that she never thought of this as an art work; see ‘Carlos Basualdo in conversation with Doris Salcedo’, p. 33. In July 2007, just before her Tate commission opened, she organized another installation, placing 25,000 candles on the Plaza de Bolívar after 11 regional mps abducted five years earlier were killed; see César Paredes, ‘Chévere que fuera una mentira y ellos estuvieran vivos’, Semana, 4 July 2007. 11

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presented the absurdity of an empty chair dangling in front of the façade of a building—something normally found inside, on the exterior. I am interested in the external, in showing that where there is violence, interiority is not possible’, she has said. Salcedo’s ephemeral art event was intended to prompt passers-by to relive their own memories of the tragic events, as well as to show solidarity with the victims’ families and survivors. No less important is the fact that the Palace of Justice is located in Colombia’s principal symbolic space. The very publicness of the Plaza de Bolívar, in the nation’s capital, gives any private act committed in it an immediate political significance that is inevitably collective. By appropriating it, Salcedo staged a silent protest in full public view, in contrast to the Uribe government’s complicit silence and that of the Betancur administration, whose bungling inhumanity had brought about the initial tragedy.

Passwords Viewing Salcedo’s work outside its national boundaries, however, poses a number of problems and dilemmas for Western eyes: to what extent does the viewer become a complicit onlooker, content to nod in sympathy without assuming any responsibility for active political solidarity? And how far—dare one ask—is Salcedo’s critical success in the West a function of the art establishment’s need to embellish its own liberal conscience? This question has become even more relevant since the 2007 announcement of her commission to produce the 8th Unilever installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Salcedo was the first artist from Latin America to be invited to fill such a prestigious space, and only the third female artist to be so honoured. Tate Modern being, arguably, among the most prestigious contemporary art museums in the world, on a par with moma in New York, Salcedo’s presence in a space of such high visibility undoubtedly marked her ascent to a position of considerable prominence. Shibboleth consisted of a 167-metre fissure that ran the length of the vast Turbine Hall. To those entering the museum, the crack was at first barely visible. It then zigzagged across the floor, growing progressively wider and deeper as it forked towards the centre of the Hall, creating a rift nearly a foot across and over three feet deep. Thereafter the cut gradually narrowed, until it finally disappeared at the far end of the Hall.

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The interior of what appeared to be an earthquake fault line was cast to resemble solid rock, but embedded within it was chain-link fencing, reminiscent of prisons or concentration camps. The Biblical title in fact refers to a process of social differentiation: in the Book of Judges, ‘shibboleth’ was the password used by the Gileadites to distinguish their enemies, the Ephraimites, who were unable to pronounce the first syllable. At Tate Modern, however, the work was more popularly known as ‘the crack’. To create a ‘crack’ of these proportions was, of course, no easy task. At one level, Shibboleth was a direct intervention into the structure of the architectural space of Tate Modern—some might even say an attack on the building’s very integrity. Salcedo has not been reticent about telling her public exactly what she considers the meaning of her work to be: Shibboleth ‘addresses the w(hole) in history that marks the bottomless difference that separates whites from non-whites. The w(hole) in history that I am referring to is the history of racism, which runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side.’ She further stated that: This piece is inopportune . . . Its appearance disturbs the Turbine Hall in the same way the appearance of immigrants disturbs the consensus and homogeneity of European societies. In high Western tradition the inopportune that interrupts development, progress, is the immigrant, the one who does not share the identity of the identical and has nothing in common with the community.12

The crack in Shibboleth clearly represents a separation, a fault line running through the ensemble of our social, political and cultural forms. What appears to be solid is in fact undermined by a basic and structural fault. Whether or not it represents racism as defined by Salcedo is, however, open to question. Like any significant work, the meaning of the crack is open to a wide range of readings. Yet for all its inherent ambiguity, it is clear that the work carries out an unprecedented physical assault on the very fabric of its host institution. No other art work has left a permanent scar on the floor space. As one critic put it: ‘Tate Modern, a triumphalist monument to our modern Western culture, is quite literally riven in two by an artwork that provokes us to question the very foundations of our ways of thought.’13 Doris Salcedo, ‘Proposal for a project for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2007’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume et al., Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, London 2007, p. 65. 13 Rachel Campbell-Johnson, ‘The jagged edge of art’, The Times, 9 October 2007. 12

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For Shibboleth, as with all her public installations, Salcedo provided an explanatory statement of exactly what she had in mind at the start of the project. In this way, she was able from the outset to direct, to a certain extent, the critical discourse to which her work gave rise. The racism discourse is no exception: in today’s climate of art-world political correctness, this interpretation of the work was not only tolerated but willingly embraced. The Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, declared at the press conference inaugurating the work: ‘There is a crack. There is a line and eventually there will be a scar. That is something that we and other artists will have to live with.’14 In contrast to the missing Colombians whose traces were being erased by the Uribe government, but restored by Salcedo, the scar that the artist has left at Tate Modern is not only inerasable but, it would seem, actually welcomed by the Western art establishment. Indeed, the way in which Tate Modern went out of its way to accom­ modate the artist was little short of extraordinary. The actual politics of the production of Shibboleth have been sealed off from any public scrutiny, just as the Turbine Hall itself was screened off for six weeks while the work was being carried out.15 It might be understandable— though not necessarily acceptable—if details of the actual financing of the commission were kept secret. But even straightforward technical questions such as how the piece was constructed, and how deep the crack actually was, remained resolutely unanswered. At the Shibboleth commission press conference, the Tate’s director, the curator and the artist pointedly avoided responding to such questions from increasingly frustrated journalists. On-site staff were apparently also instructed not to disclose any details of the construction of the work itself, even though some felt proud enough to confide: ‘Of course, I know how it was made.’ This intriguing lack of transparency turns out, on investigation, to be a condition imposed by the artist herself. Talking about how art is actually created has been an integral part of artistic discourse; yet Tate Modern felt able to turn a blind eye to its public-education remit and complied with Salcedo’s request. That it was willing to go to such lengths is interesting testimony to the relationship between the self-proclaimed ‘Third World’ artist and her ‘First World’ art institution. Even Salcedo herself expressed surprise at Tate Modern’s unqualified approval: ‘It’s quite ‘Latest Tate modern installation is a yawning chasm’, Reuters, 8 October 2007. This was not the case, for example, with Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in 2003.

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extraordinary that the Tate would accept this work—there are not many museums in the world that would dare.’16

After-effects The Tate commission undeniably launched Salcedo into a stage of her career where she could command the same sort of global attention as any comparable Western artist. Although she had long benefited from the support of art-world insiders—museum directors, critics and curators—media coverage and critical appreciation of her work had remained surprisingly limited. This had nothing directly to do with the quality of her work, but more with the economic and cultural dominance of the Western art world. The scope and scale of the art market, the number and standing of the curators and critics, the importance of art magazines, journals and books are all far more developed than any that a ‘Third World’ country could possibly sustain. The work of British artists such as Rachel Whiteread, an approximate contemporary of Salcedo, immediately generates scores of notices and reviews, both locally and internationally—something that had not been the case for Salcedo. With the Turbine Hall commission, however, she suddenly became a household name in the Western art world; her success reverberated in the ‘Third World’, in particular her home country.17 The Western art establishment that extended such a warm welcome to Salcedo is not of course exclusively composed of public institutions such as Tate Modern. In anticipation of the high-profile installation at Tate Modern, her agent in London, White Cube, opened a solo show of Salcedo’s work on 15 September 2007, three weeks ahead of the opening of Shibboleth. The timing could not have been more strategically chosen or more commercially oriented: given the upcoming Tate exposure, it was only reasonable to assume that Salcedo’s reputation would rise significantly and so, naturally, would her market value. Eight medium-to-large furniture pieces as well as a number of smaller cemented chairs were crowded into the modestly sized Hoxton Square Ossian Ward, ‘Into the Breach’, Time Out London supplement, October 2007, p. 5. Though she has rarely exhibited in Colombia in the last two decades, Salcedo is well known and respected in her home country. Semana magazine has described her several times as ‘the most important Colombian artist in the world’, noting the ‘favourable comments and the frequent news of her successful exhibitions at the main museums around the world’. See ‘El enigma de Doris Salcedo’, Semana, 13 October 2002 and ‘Doris Tate’, Semana, 14 April 2007. 16 17

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premises. Rarely had the gallery displayed works so crammed together. In terms of quantity and quality, what could easily have been a museum exhibition in fact turned out to be a sales opportunity, given the fact that the supply of Salcedo’s earlier furniture pieces was so limited and demand for it consequently so high. The fact that White Cube had bought five of the older pieces back from private collectors could therefore be seen as a strategy designed to secure a market monopoly. As one critic remarked of the gallery owner Jay Jopling: ‘He’s now the one who owns everything; he can give you any price for any piece.’ The three new furniture pieces presumably produced specifically for the sale raise further questions. Although Salcedo has never drawn any sort of line under the 1990s furniture pieces, it was something of a surprise to see the project resurrected, as it were, and reappearing on the market after a break of ten or so years.18 In 2008, Salcedo produced two further new pieces for her New York gallery, Alexander and Bonin. With each piece potentially worth half a million dollars, if not more, it is easy to see what was at stake.

Corporate funding? The issues raised by Salcedo’s parallel shows at the Tate Modern and White Cube can perhaps most usefully be viewed in the context of the problematic relationship between public art and commercial enterprise under neo-liberal capitalism. In Britain, the present-day pattern was established by the Thatcher government, which sought to ensure that public institutions could no longer function properly without relying heavily on private and corporate funding. Although Salcedo’s commission came under the banner of the Unilever Series, the corporation’s sponsorship money, some quarter of a million pounds each year, is unlikely on its own to have met the full production costs.19 In 2004 Salcedo had explained: ‘Originally I planned to do many more pieces . . . but it demanded too much energy, and I felt I had already achieved what I was looking for.’ See ‘Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael Herzog’, in Cantos/Cuentos Colombianos: Arte Colombiano, Zurich 2005, p. 152. 19 The Unilever Series, inaugurated in 2000, was a sponsorship deal between Unilever and Tate Modern worth £1.25 million for commissioning works in the Turbine Hall over five years. It was renewed in 2005 for a further three years for £1 million (Salcedo’s commission fell under this tranche), and again, this time to the tune of £2.1 million, for the next five years between 2008 and 2012; see Tate press releases of 13 May 1999, 6 April 2007 and 18 July 2007. 18

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To quote Achim Borchardt-Hume, the Tate curator who coordinated the commission: It’s not the sponsor who pays for a project, nor did Unilever pay for the whole Turbine Hall commission. It’s rather that Unilever made the commitment to pay a certain amount of money in support of the project, but then the project budget is something else . . . Obviously Doris’s work has super-high production costs. It’s not a low-budget production from the outset. There can only be certain galleries, and certain mechanisms of production, that could make that possible.’20

Precisely what these ‘certain mechanisms of production’ were is, however, destined to remain a mystery. Who contributed, and how much, toward the cost of producing Salcedo’s work? Despite being a model of helpfulness in other respects, Borchardt-Hume resolutely declined to reveal any figures on the actual cost of Salcedo’s commission or any sponsorship deals involved in it. Nor was my question on the same topic, filed with the Freedom of Information Office Group in the Director’s Office at Tate Modern, any more revealing. Not only did the Tate refuse to disclose the total budget, but they also declined to give any details of other additional funding, stating that: ‘Tate cannot disclose the amount of budget for individual installations’: The amount of the budget for Shibboleth has been withheld under section 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act . . . as we believe it would prejudice Tate’s commercial interests to release this . . . The additional support: the foi group considers that to supply this information would prejudice the commercial interests of Tate in relation to those sources, and that the public interest in releasing this is outweighed by the public interest of Tate’s continued ability to work with these sources.21

Tate Modern’s non-reply is a model of non-information under the socalled Freedom of Information Act. It is not impossible to imagine that the Shibboleth commission, having been first produced and fabricated in Bogotá by many staff over several months, and then shipped to London to be installed on site, over a matter of six or so weeks, by Salcedo and a Colombian and local crew consisting Interview with the author, 30 November 2010, London. Ruth Findlay, Senior Press Officer at Tate, in email correspondence with the author, 11 February 2011.

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of scores of people working in teams, could have incurred costs that would easily overshoot the £1 million mark.22 No private collector could be expected to support a project so obviously designed to redound to the glory of Tate Modern; in any case, Salcedo’s large furniture pieces are mostly in public, not private, collections. What is more, as the commission already had a commercial sponsor in Unilever, any additional donor would inevitably have had to remain more or less anonymous. It seems likely that Salcedo’s own commercial agents in New York and London provided the only possible mechanism whereby the commission could secure the extra finance. If this were the case, it would come as no surprise to see these galleries’ agents taking a direct interest in enhancing the reputation and market price of such an artist. It is no secret in the inner circles of the art world that commercial galleries often play a role in funding artists’ appearances at international biennials. The lack of transparency surrounding the production of Shibboleth brings to the fore the problematic nature of public and commercial ‘co-operation’—the symbiosis between Tate Modern, in essence a public institution, and commercial enterprise in the shape of the White Cube gallery. Is it a happy marriage based on a common interest in producing a landmark work of art for the public whom Tate Modern presumably exists to serve? Or is it perhaps more a private enterprise in disguise, one that advances the commercial interests of White Cube, if not those of the artist herself? While as a ‘Third World’ artist, Salcedo has produced work that carries with it a critical agenda vis-à-vis the power structures of Western art institutions, it is also unavoidably implicated in the very structures she wishes to criticize. This paradox is perhaps inevitable as long as the status quo remains unchanged, with the hierarchy of the contemporary art world still dominated by Western institutions. After all, Salcedo’s universal visibility in terms of global reach can only be achieved if she Salcedo stated in an interview: ‘There are around 100 people working in teams.’ See Ossian Ward, ‘Into the Breach’, p. 5. In some press reports, Shibboleth was described as ‘a new £300,000 work of art’; see Nigel Reynolds, ‘Tate Modern reveals giant crack in civilization’, Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2007. Informed sources, however, do not endorse this figure. According to a tabloid, shipping the work from Colombia to London cost £23,410, and a £3,000 commission fee was paid to the artist; see ‘Revealed: How the Tate Modern’s “crack in the ground” cost the taxpayers £23,000’, Daily Mail, 24 February 2008. 22

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works and exhibits with powerful Western galleries, and if her critique of existing structures continues to be sanctioned by institutions such as Tate Modern. In negotiating her way between the two worlds of Colombia and North America/Western Europe, Doris Salcedo has forged a rewarding career both in terms of aesthetic achievement and worldly success. Yet works of art and practices that seek to question existing power relations cannot necessarily be accommodated to capitalist market interests without their legitimacy being called into question to some degree. What does it mean if works, painstakingly conceived and produced to commemorate the appalling social reality of Colombia’s missing, are later reproduced under the commercial imperatives of a West-run system that condones—indeed, supports with military aid—the existing power structures and social inequalities in Colombia? Where this sort of work becomes the servant of commercial manipulation, the art itself risks being neutralized.

allan sekula & noël burch

The Forgotten Space Notes for a Film The subject of the film is globalization and the sea, the ‘forgotten space’ of our modernity. Its premise is that the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest. But this truth is not self-evident and must be approached as a puzzle, or mystery; a problem to be solved. Sea trade is an integral component of the world-industrial system, but we are distracted from the full implications of this insight by two powerful myths. The first is that the sea is nothing more than a residual mercantilist space: a reservoir of cultural and economic anachronisms, relics of an older and obsolete economy—a world of decrepitude, rust and creaking cables, of the slow movement of heavy things. The second is that we live in a post-industrial society, that cybernetic systems and the service economy have radically marginalized the ‘old economy’ of heavy material fabrication and processing. Thus the fiction of obsolescence mobilizes reserves of sentimental longing for things which are not really dead. As ships become more like buildings—the giant, floating warehouses of the ‘just-in-time’ system of distribution—factories begin to resemble ships, stealing away stealthily in the night, restlessly searching for ever cheaper labour. A garment factory in Los Angeles or Hong Kong closes; the work benches and sewing machines reappear in the suburbs of Guangzhou or Dacca. In the automobile industry, for example, the function of the ship is akin to that of conveyor systems within the old integrated car factory: parts span the world on their journey to the final assembly line. Today, over 90 per cent of the world’s cargo moves by sea. Without a ‘revolution’ in ocean-going cargo-handling technology, the global factory would not exist, nor the phenomenon of globalization itself. What began in the mid-1950s as a modest American improvement in cargo logistics has now taken on world-historic importance. The cargo container—a standardized metal box, easily transferred from ship to truck to train—has radically transformed the space and time of port cities and ocean passages. There have been enormous increases in economies of scale. Older transport links, such as the Panama Canal, risk sliding into obsolescence as ships become more gargantuan.

The film moves between four port cities: Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Bilbao. It visits the industrial hinterland in southern China and the transport hinterland in the heart of Holland. The first three can be classed as ‘super-ports’, the largest in the world. In Bilbao, a fading port with a brave maritime history, functional atrophy coexists with the symbolic hypertrophy of the Gehry Guggenheim, a delirium of neo-baroque maritime nostalgia wedded to the equally delirious promise of the ‘new economy’. Super-ports, pushed to the periphery of the metropolitan centre, require vast tracts of land for the containers’ sorting and storage. The old, sheltering deep-water port, with its steep hillsides and panoramic vistas, is less suited to these new spatial demands than low-lying delta plains, which nonetheless require continual dredging for the ever-deeper draft of the new super-ships. The old waterfront culture of sailor bars, flophouses, brothels and ship chandlers gives way either to a depopulated terrain vague or—blessed with the energies of real-estate speculators—to a new artificial maritime space of theme restaurants, aestheticized nautical relics and expensive ocean-view condominiums. As the class character of the port cities changes, the memory of mutiny and rebellion by dockers, seafarers, fishermen and shipyard workers—struggles that were fundamental to the formation of the institutions of social democracy and free trade-unionism—fades from public awareness. What tourist in today’s Amsterdam is drawn to the old monument commemorating dock-workers’ heroic but futile strike to prevent the Nazi deportation of the Dutch Jews? Today’s seafaring crews are drawn from the old and new Third Worlds: Filipinos, Chinese, Indonesians, Ukrainians, Russians. The conditions they endure are not unlike those experienced by the lascars of the 18th century. The legal instrument underwriting their exploitation is the ‘flag of convenience’ system, which allows ships owned in rich countries to be registered in poor ones. Here again, American capital was in the lead, seeking to break powerful maritime unions in the wake of the Second World War: the flag of convenience was created to obscure legal responsibility for safety and fair labour practices. The cargo containers are everywhere, mobile and anonymous: ‘coffins of remote labour-power’, carrying goods manufactured by invisible workers on the other side of the globe. For apologists of globalization, this flow is indispensable for the continued prosperity of the West and for the deferred prosperity of those who labour, so far away. But perhaps this is a case for Pandora—or for her more clairvoyant sister, Cassandra. The Forgotten Space will be screening in selected cinemas from May 2011.

benno teschke

THE FETISH OF GEOPOLITICS Reply to Gopal Balakrishnan

G

opal balakrishnan is one of the foremost experts in the Anglo-American world on the life and work of Carl Schmitt, and I am grateful for his response in nlr 68, ‘The Geopolitics of Separation’, to my essay on the thinker, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, in nlr 67.1 Balakrishnan’s intellectual biography of Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in the field, ‘the best English-language study’ on the subject.2 For a critical American scholar, the attraction of exploring and validating Schmitt as a radical and insightful critic of American imperialism and its liberalcosmopolitan apologists would seem unobjectionable. Schmitt deployed a remorseless and uncompromising vocabulary to dissect the crisis of the legal form in the inter-war period, analysing the pathologies of liberal international law and the relations between constitutionalism, democracy and emergency powers, in order systematically to deconstruct the practice and ideology of the liberal-capitalist ‘zone of peace’—and with it, the incipient neutralization of inter-state relations. Within this context, Balakrishnan not only regards Schmitt as a necessary complement to Marx, but clearly as a superior analytical voice and point of reference in fully understanding the legal-political controversies and geopolitics that marked the crisis-ridden transition from the ius publicum europaeum—the classical European inter-state order, regulated by international law—to an apparently de-politicized legal-moral universalism, codified in the Versailles Peace Treaty and institutionalized in the League of Nations. Schmitt, Balakrishnan suggests, identified a politicojurisprudential problematic—and developed a corresponding categorial register—that Marx, in his own time, had never fully addressed or new left review 69 may jun 2011

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conceptualized. The systematic exploration of this register constitutes the strength of Balakrishnan’s outstanding study. Yet, given Balakrishnan’s Marxist credentials and background, the remit and objective of what is, after all, an intellectual portrait, remain curiously restricted. The introduction to The Enemy frames his approach from the angle of a ‘diachronic contextualization’ and ‘intertextual reconstruction’ of Schmitt’s work, resulting in a ‘provisional framework for the comprehensive and critical evaluation of his thought’. The first aim conveys the nature of the work better than the second. For this promise of critique—already toned down by Balakrishnan’s prefatory warning that ‘adopting the role of either prosecutor or defence attorney in discussing Schmitt’ presents a false choice—remains unfulfilled.3 Critique in The Enemy hardly ever reaches beyond occasional and rhetorical references to Schmitt as a deeply disturbing figure. In the process, the study’s emphasis on textual exposition and reconstruction relegates any systematic critique of the intellectual architecture, analytical purchase and political legacy of Schmitt’s thought to the sidelines, rendering the work primarily a philological, exegetic and informational exercise—with greetings from Germany to the us. In fact, Schmittian categories now seem to form the strategic centre of Balakrishnan’s broader reflections on the grand contours of the post-Cold War international scene, encapsulated in the master-idea of neutralizations.4 More than a decade after The Enemy’s date of publication, such professed equidistance and equanimity, turning in the interim into embrace rather than critique, can no longer be afforded (if it ever could). The growing recognition and celebration of Schmitt in the wider social sciences and, specifically, in the field of International Relations, the actuality of Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘The Geopolitics of Separation: Response to Teschke’s “Decisions and Indecisions”’, nlr 68, March–April 2011; and Benno Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions: Political and Intellectual Receptions of Carl Schmitt’, nlr 67, January–February 2011. I would like to thank Frédérick Guillaume Dufour, Kees van der Pijl, Justin Rosenberg, Sam Knafo, Kamran Matin, Steffan Wyn-Jones and the members of the Sussex pm Research Group for comments. 2 Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London and New York 2000. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960, Cambridge 2001, p. 423. 3 Balakrishnan, The Enemy, pp. 3, 1. 4 Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, London and New York 2009, pp. iiv–xiv. 1

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Schmittian tropes in 21st-century American foreign-policy circles and the current contestation of dictatorial states of exception across the Middle East, from Tunisia and Egypt via Syria to Bahrain, have sharply re-politicized his significance, reception and legacy.

Restating the argument In this context, my intervention in nlr 67 was formally organized around five axes of inquiry. The first part provided an exposition of Schmitt’s grand historical-conceptual narrative of the ‘spatial revolutions’ that punctuate the history of international law and order, from the New World Discoveries to Hitler’s Großraumpolitik; followed by an outline of current neo-Schmittian attempts to comprehend an altered contemporary geopolitical constellation in comparable terms. The second section, drawing on Reinhard Mehring’s recent biography of Schmitt, set out a compressed diachronic contextualization of his intellectual and political trajectory.5 It concluded that Schmitt’s thought, far from constituting the ad hoc, disconnected and conjunctural interventions of an intellectual bricoleur and footloose adventurist, can be better understood as revolving around an organic and consistent set of intellectual and political preoccupations, expressed in a recognizable problematic: the crisis of legal determinacy, the value of the state executive, German autonomy, political and geopolitical order in times of extremes. In face of these, Schmitt developed a series of ever more radicalized solutions: from his proto-decisionist writings of the late Kaiserreich and defence of the legality of Imperial Germany’s war during the 1920s, via the conception of the political in terms of the agonal friend–enemy binary in the late 1920s and advocacy of presidential emergency powers during the crisis of the Weimar Republic (his definition of sovereignty), to the full-throated embrace of the ‘total state’, the Führer-principle and insistence on territorial conquests as the fons et origo of all international law, as the Wehrmacht marched towards Moscow. Though his natural intellectual maturation and political opportunism afforded conceptual adjustments and theoretical shifts that need to be registered, it is this underlying Leitmotiv—rather than any ‘unifying fascist logic’—that forms Schmitt’s basso continuo, which any de-totalization of his thought is likely to render invisible. 5

Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall, Eine Biographie, Munich 2009.

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The third and central part of my essay performed two tasks: first, it mounted an immanent critique of the gap between Schmitt’s core theoretical axioms—decisionism, concept of the political, concreteorder-thinking, and their substantive analogues: state of emergency, friend–enemy distinction, nomos—and the historical narrative constructed on their premises, outlining deficiencies in both. It was my thesis that this triple axiomatic consistently suppressed social relations as a relevant category of analysis for the history of international law, while elevating the abstraction of antagonistic power, the fetish of the political (and geopolitical), to the neuralgic centre of Schmitt’s thought. This theoretical orientation is actively consonant with the political Schmitt as a counter-revolutionary étatist and, later, fascist thinker. Further—and against Schmitt’s own advice6—the section probed whether it was possible to extricate Schmitt’s conceptual apparatus as a generic analytic to illuminate past and present geopolitical transformations and configurations, as the neo-Schmittian literature seems to suggest, answering in the negative. The essay then examined Schmitt’s notion of Großraum, as the territorial unit for a new planetary regionalism and the central juridical category of the Nazi ‘new international order’, along with his ex post attempts to sanitize this category’s political complicity with Hitler’s Großraumpolitik. The final section returned to Schmitt’s intellectual and political legacy, indicating—contra Mehring’s thesis of his role as a quantité négligeable in the Federal Republic of Germany and beyond—Schmitt’s profound impact within (West) German social sciences, his influential role in the American disciplines of politics and International Relations and, more specifically, in American neo-conservative thought, which provided the ideological backdrop to the foreign policy of the Bush ii presidency. Moral aversion was reserved for the epilogue; no aprioristic ideological condemnations should foreclose the analytical view on Schmitt’s thought.

Case for the defence? Balakrishnan’s response declines to engage with the formal composition of my essay, which delineated precisely ‘the relationship ‘All political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation.’ Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political [1927], Chicago 1996, p. 30.

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between theoretical assumptions, ideological limitations and political alignments’ that he demands. Instead, he couches his response in terms of an overriding and, ultimately, banal summary judgement: my intervention was tarnished by an ideological dismissal of Schmitt that blocked a careful unscrambling of what is alive and what is dead in his thought—a task that can only be performed by (yet another) sober diachronic contextualization and a critically informed interrogation of his entire oeuvre. From this core message derive several relevant, but secondary charges: that I misrepresent Schmitt’s awareness of the socio-economic preconditions of emergency powers; conflate Schmitt’s writings of the Weimar and Nazi periods; misread Schmitt’s wider history of international law and order; and overlook an inconvenient and possibly embarrassing similarity between Schmitt’s ‘fascist epic’ of the rise and fall of the ‘Westphalian System’ and my own interpretation of Europe’s long-term trajectory, leading to the objection that my conception of capitalist geopolitics—the alleged ‘geopolitics of separation’—looks one-dimensional compared to Schmitt’s ‘dialectical’ reading of the relation between geopolitics, statehood and capitalist development. The response concludes with a nonchalant dismissal of the significance of Schmitt’s influence on neo-conservative foreign policy, suggested to be in line with the structural continuity of America’s role in the world. Throughout his response, Balakrishnan attempts to diffuse my critique of Schmitt by composing a florilegium of citations gleaned from the ephemera of Schmitt’s writings, rather than directly confronting his central theoretical propositions, developed in the texts that dominate the Schmitt reception and discussion. In the following, I will argue that any theoretical, rather than biographical, reading will disclose that a Schmittian sociology of sovereignty or emergency is a contradiction in terms. I will further clarify why Schmitt’s history of international law and order, especially as outlined in The Nomos, has to be understood in context-specific ideological terms, which render it deeply problematic on theoretical, logical and empirical grounds. By contrast, I will remind Balakrishnan how my own attempts to rethink this history from the angle of Political Marxism lead to a fundamentally different historical narrative, which Balakrishnan misrepresents. Rather than implying that Schmitt and Marx can be read as mutually supplementary critics of liberalism and capitalism, I will

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suggest that the ontological, epistemological and theoretical premises of Marxism are diametrically opposed to Schmitt’s, forcing us to renew our efforts to rethink the history of geopolitics in genuinely Marxian terms. I will conclude by arguing that, rather than conceive of Schmitt’s theoretical apparatus as complementary to Marx’s, there is more evidence to suggest that Schmitt understood his own intellectual production in terms of an anti-Marx for his own times.7

Sociology of the emergency? According to Balakrishnan, my account ‘missed Schmitt’s many attempts to frame the problem of emergency powers in socio-political terms’.8 Drawing a line from Schmitt’s recognition of the rise of the proletariat to the financial crisis of the Weimar state, set in train by the Versailles reparations, Balakrishnan implies a deep awareness on Schmitt’s part of the socio-economic determinants that produced the instrument of the state of emergency. But this is not tantamount to the much more demanding—and implausible—proposition that Schmitt articulated or understood his own history and theory of sovereignty in terms of a historical sociology of constitutional developments. Balakrishnan fails to distinguish between historical references and theoretical concepts. For no amount of localized commentary and exemplary illustration can validate the suggestion that Schmitt systematically incorporated the sociological as the strategic point of reference for a reformulated approach to the history of constitutional developments. Social relations remained theoretically exterior to, and systematically excluded from, his conception of sovereignty, as formalized in political decisionism. Sovereign is he who decides over the state of exception—‘an absolute decision created out of nothingness’.9 This definitional narrowing—in fact: erasure—of the net of determinations of the decision to an unmediated subjective act is the essence of Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty. Quis iudicabit? Who will decide? Charge two—Balakrishnan’s suggestion (nlr 68, pp. 63–4) that I conflated Schmitt’s Weimar and Nazi writings—seems disingenuous: see ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, pp. 70–7. If there was one decisive theoretical caesura, but not a hiatus, in Schmitt’s writings, I would locate it in The Three Types of Juristic Thought (1934). Schmitt’s deep-seated and, at times, histrionic anti-Semitism is discussed in Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The ‘Jewish Question’, the Holocaust and German Legal Theory, Madison, wi 2007. 8 Balakrishnan, ‘Geopolitics of Separation’, p. 61. 9 Schmitt, Political Theology [1922], Cambridge, ma 1985, p. 66. 7

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Social forces do not enter Schmitt’s definition of the extra-normative declaration of the state of emergency, which remained analytically a supra-sociological, extra-constitutional (as well as ideologically antisocial) device—a liminal concept—for the restoration of order. In this context, it should be recalled that Schmitt’s decision to define sovereignty in terms of the exception was not the result of a dispassionate and scholarly enquiry into the ultimate locus of power, but a politicized and normative intervention into the jurisprudential debates on the interpretation of the Weimar Constitution’s Article 48, on the scope of presidential emergency powers and executive government by decree. For Schmitt, sovereignty should reside in the authoritative decision, rendering it a non-relational concept, outside society and even outside politics—analogous to the miracle in theology. Balakrishnan surely knows that Schmitt explicitly related his notion of the exception to political theology, rather than a historical sociology of public law. While Schmitt’s The Dictatorship advances a much richer history of state theory and constitutional law—from the classical Roman institution of the dictator to Weimar’s Article 48—than his Political Theology, social relations remain empirically acknowledged, but theoretically undigested.10 Schmitt is not known or read as a theoretician of the inter-war economic downturn, revolutions and civil wars; and no neo-Schmittian writer, as far as I am aware, has actually reformulated Schmitt’s ultranarrow definition of the exception to develop a theoretical perspective on sovereignty that would enlarge its scope to incorporate the historicity of differential social relations of power. Schmitt developed a legal-political register, unsupported by sociological or political-economic analogues. This does not per se invalidate this register, but leaves it suspended in mid-air. Schmitt constructed legal-political concepts against the crisis of the Weimar state, rather than concepts of the crisis. That a historical sociology of the exception remains a distinct possibility—and an ongoing research desideratum—from an alternative Marxist perspective can be learned from the writings of Schmitt’s disciples, Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, on the nexus between capitalist crisis, the dissolution of Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des Modernen Souveränitätsgedanken bis zum Proletarischen Klassenkampf [1921], 7th edn, Berlin 2006. For a brief statistical survey that relates the declaration of states of emergency to strikes and class conflict (rather than to martial law) see Mark Neocleous, ‘The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency”’, Alternatives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 191–213.

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the rule of law and the legal structure of Nazism.11 A distinctly Schmittian sociology of power remains, however, a contradiction in terms.

Towards a Marxist geopolitics Balakrishnan further suggests that Schmitt’s work and my own share common theoretical orientations, as ‘what Schmitt wrote often seems to touch on the conceptual centre of [Teschke’s] Marxist understanding of modern statehood and geopolitics, which hinges on the historical process of the separation of the political from the economic, of coercion from the conditions of surplus appropriation’.12 From this premise, three consecutive moves follow for Balakrishnan. First, that in my reading this separation, once established, ‘never becomes problematic in the subsequent history of capitalism’—the alleged ‘geopolitics of separation’. In contrast, Schmitt’s reading of the multi-level crisis entailed by the collapse of the distinction between state and economy, or inter-state system and capitalist world-market, generated a much more ‘dialectical’ interpretation. Second, that Schmitt’s historiography of the rise and fall of the ‘Westphalian’ inter-state system, as set out in The Nomos of the Earth (1950), constitutes a similar, if in toto superior, narrative to my Myth of 1648; and, third, that Schmitt’s history demonstrates greater affinities and parallels with Marx’s original categories than I would allow. The point of departure of my wider work was to develop a research programme that would incorporate the problematic of geopolitics, theoretically and historically, into a revised Marxist framework. The relative absence of geopolitics in Marx’s and Engels’s own works, and the hitherto insufficient attempts to resolve this challenge from within the Marxist tradition, formed the reference point for my critique, informed by the premises of Political Marxism.13 The Myth of 1648 built on and further problematized the pathbreaking work by Robert Brenner, Ellen Wolfgang Luthard, ed., Von der Weimarer Republik zum Faschismus: Die Auflösung der Demokratischen Rechtsordnung, Frankfurt 1976; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, New York 1944; William Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, ma 1994; Scheuerman, ed., The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Berkeley 1996. 12 Balakrishnan, ‘Geopolitics of Separation’, p. 62. 13 For a critical survey on Marxism and International Relations see Teschke, ‘Marxism’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, Oxford 2008, pp. 163–87. 11

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Wood and George Comninel on the class conflicts driving the transition towards agrarian-capitalist social property relations in late medieval and early modern England.14 One of its aims was to show how the conceptual assumption of a differentiation between the economic and the political in capitalism translates into a historical account of the contested construction of a new form of English 17th-century sovereignty, culminating in the 1688 formula of ‘the King-in-Parliament’: a parliamentary, constitutional monarchy that institutionalized, though in non-linear ways, the formal separation between a public, de-personalized state and a privatized economic sphere. Post-1688 England also started to develop new foreign-policy techniques, encapsulated in ‘balancing’ within the context of a pre-capitalist and predominantly ‘absolutist’ European inter-state system. If capitalism is conceived not as a de-politicized and de-subjectified market economy, governed by ‘economic laws’, but as a set of socio-politically contested social relations, the implications of its rise cannot be conceived in terms of abstract logical derivations, but demand a radical historicization of its further, inter-state development. For the separation-argument is not conceived as an absolute, once-and-for-all insulation of spheres, but as an internal relation between states and markets whose degrees of de-politicization and re-politicization depend on historically concrete praxes. Capitalism is a relation of power. This also implies that capitalist social relations—once established in one country—do not automatically and transnationally replicate themselves across the components of the international system. The articulation of their international effects and implications requires a sharp move away from teleology, from a universalizing structural economism and a geopolitical functionalism; it demands a geopolitics as process, rather than superstructure. These elementary ideas resulted in a novel research prospectus, explicitly opposed to the Communist Manifesto’s cosmopolitan universalism— the expansion of a capitalist world-market as the mega-subject of 14 Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, London and New York 2003. See also T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge 1985; Ellen Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge 1995; George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London and New York 1987. See also Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State [1990], Leiden 2007.

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world history; curiously echoed in Schmitt’s long-term prognostics of a ‘spaceless universalism’. The new geopolitical Marxism not only demands a re-politicization of capitalist development, as a contested and regionally differentiated institutionalization of social relations, but also a radical geopoliticization of its historical course, initially refracted through the drive of pre-capitalist ‘absolutist’ territorial polities towards ‘geopolitical accumulation’. Contra Marx and Engels, The Myth of 1648 argued that the expansion of capitalism was a political and, a fortiori, a geopolitical process, in which pre-capitalist ruling classes had to design counter-strategies of reproduction to defend their position in an international environment that put them at an economic and coercive disadvantage: More often than not, it was heavy artillery that battered down pre-capitalist walls, and the construction and reconstruction of these walls required new state strategies of modernization. These . . . ranged from the intensification of domestic relations of exploitation and the build-up of an increasingly repressive state apparatus for military and fiscal mobilization, via ‘enlightened’ policies of neo-mercantilism and imperialism, to the adoption of liberal economic policies.

While the initial impetus towards modernization and capitalist transformation was geopolitical, state responses to this pressure were refracted through respective class relations in national contexts, including class resistance. In this sense, the ‘alignment of the provinces’ generated nothing but national Sonderwege (special paths): If Britain showed its neighbours the image of their future, it did so in a highly distorted way. Conversely, Britain never developed a pristine culture of capitalism, since she was from the first dragged into an international environment that inflected her domestic politics and long-term development. The distortions were mutual. The transposition of capitalism to the Continent and the rest of the world was riddled with social conflicts, civil and international wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions.15

This perspective prompted my ongoing reconceptualization of political Marxism into geopolitical Marxism, to problematize the orthodox Marxist notion of bourgeois revolution.16 The historical substantiation of these programmatic notes and the extension of the story of The Teschke, The Myth of 1648, pp. 265–6. Teschke, ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State-Formation and the Absence of the International’, Historical Materialism, vol. 13, no. 2, 2005, pp. 21–2.

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Myth of 1648 into the nineteenth century and beyond are yet to come. However, the idea that, once established, two logics—the geopolitics of the inter-state system and the transnationalizing economics of a capitalist world-market—can travel unproblematically and in unison side by side is the exact opposite of my argument.17 Balakrishnan’s ascription of a ‘geopolitics of separation’ to my work thus represents a substantial misreading.

Aporias of concrete-order thought Does Schmitt provide a geopolitics of non-separation, possibly even a dialectical one, which keeps geopolitics and geo-economics internally related? To ascertain this, Schmitt’s substantive writings on law and history would need to be re-anchored in the reformulated theoretical premises announced in his 1934 paradigm shift from decisionism to concrete-order-thinking. He first deployed this to replace the liberal and universalist idea of the rule of law—and its increasingly threatened principles of generality and predictability—by a situation-bound de-formalization of law, upheld by and encased in different nationally homogeneous legal cultures.18 As Schmitt’s preoccupations moved from constitutional to international law during the mid-1930s, he realized that political decisionism was insufficient to capture the politics and geopolitics of land-appropriations and spatial revolution, which he now privileged as foundational, constitutive acts of world-ordering, so as to write the history of international law as an anti-liberal, anti-normative tract. The subsequent shift to concrete-order-thinking was meant to remedy this explanatory vacuum. It is premised on a single and axiomatic thesis: that all legal orders are concrete, territorial orders, founded by an original, constitutive act of land-capture. This establishes a primary and radical title to land: a nomos—a unity of space, power and law.19 Given this turn to the ‘concrete’, how could Schmitt theoretically account for his otherwise perceptive remarks on the separation of the economic This argument is further developed in Teschke, ‘Debating “The Myth of 1648”: State-Formation, the Interstate System and the Rise of Capitalism—A Rejoinder’, International Politics, vol. 43, no. 5, 2006, pp. 531–73; and Teschke and Hannes Lacher, ‘The Many “Logics” of Capitalist Competition’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 20, no. 4, 2007, pp. 565–80. 18 Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, Westport, ct 2004. 19 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, New York 2003, pp. 44–7. 17

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and political, the world market and inter-state system, which formed the historical condition of possibility for a transnationalizing us imperialism, without negating his axiomatics? Even to begin to grasp this double separation, Schmitt had to have recourse to the Hegelian-Marxist figure of thought of the separation between society and the state, which he duly acknowledged in a footnote. Balakrishnan might be right that ‘the multilevel crisis of this constitutive difference is, in fact, the central problem cutting across nearly all of Schmitt’s writings on the inter-war disorder’.20 But Schmitt’s turn to international political economy imperilled the core of his geopolitical axiomatic: a retraction from concrete-order-thinking and a move towards a transnational economism, reserved for AngloAmerican liberal imperialism but bracketed for inter-war Germany. For Schmitt’s theoretical excursion into the field of international political economy forced him to change theoretical registers—a volte face not licensed by his method of concrete-order-thinking. Where Schmitt excavates the roots of the new universal order, he is pressed into an analysis of the international political economy of American rule—an analysis that contradicts his premise that every international legal order is grounded in an original and constitutive act of ‘land appropriation’. For Wilhelmine Germany was not invaded, occupied or annexed. Capitalism’s bordercancelling tendency also cancels the core thesis of his fascist period. What ultimately emerges is less a dialectical reading of geopolitics and geo-economics, but rather the fetishization of a German formal empire against an informal us imperialism, insulated from any enquiry into the domestic political economy of fascist imperialism. The former arises like a deus ex machina from the purely political invocation of the friend– enemy distinction to counter the abstract Western notion of a spaceless universalism with the German concrete-order, a fascist Großraum.21

A Nomos for Das Kapital? Having suggested that my text ‘gives scant consideration to Schmitt’s Weimar writings, i.e. the texts for which he is best known and form the basis of almost all of the contemporary reception of his work’, Balakrishnan finally turns to Schmitt’s fascist literature, The Leviathan Balakrishnan, ‘Geopolitics of Separation’, p. 62. For the policy-impact and widespread circulation of the terms Großraum and Großraumwirtschaft in 1933–45, see the documents collected in Reinhard Opitz, ed., Europastrategien des Deutschen Kapitals, 1900–1945, Cologne 1977, parts iii and iv.

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in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), Land and Sea (1942) and The Nomos of the Earth—the central text for the current Schmittophilia in the discipline of International Relations—while ignoring Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung (1939): the intellectual blueprint for his conception of the new fascist ‘greater territorial order’. According to Balakrishnan, The Nomos was a piece of saturnine melancholia, written when the contours of German defeat in the East were already visible after Stalingrad. This is a misrepresentation of its conception and intention, though its execution had to square the divergence of unfolding historical reality with its core thesis: land-appropriations. Rather than a coda and lament—‘a conservative retrospect on the origins of an inter-state civilization that had arisen out of the fiery chaos of war and primitive appropriations’, which ‘now seemed to be returning to it’, as Balakrishnan suggests—The Nomos was designed as the ‘official’ celebration and justification of Hitler’s Großraumpolitik, which Schmitt reconnected with pre-liberal nomos-constituting acts of landappropriations, legitimizing both.22 What had come to an end was not the inter-state civilization of the ius publicum europaeum (terminated at Versailles, 1919), but rather the new Germanic vision of intra-regional law and order, revolving around a pluriverse of co-existing pan-regions, that was Schmitt’s counter-programme to liberal capitalism’s ‘spaceless universalism’. The Red Army had not only put an end to the Wehrmacht, it had also decapitated the cap-stone of The Nomos—the unfinished final chapter and the missing Conclusion—forcing it into an abrupt and speculative ending. This was evidenced by the absence of the three corollaries which were added to the 2003 English translation, written by Schmitt in the 1950s, from the German original. Balakrishnan’s attempt to dissociate The Nomos, as a post-fascist afterthought, from Schmitt’s pro-fascist writings is ultimately grounded in his inattention to concrete-order-thinking as the unifying theoretical perspective in Schmitt’s writings in and for the Third Reich.23 This unity of For the genesis of The Nomos see Peter Haggenmacher’s introduction to the French edition. Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre dans le Droit des Gens du Jus Publicum Europaeum, Paris 2001, pp. 1–44. 23 The concepts of Großraum and nomos were floated in 1928 and remained central organizing terms thereafter. Carl Schmitt, ‘Völkerrechtliche Probleme im Rheingebiet’, in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles, 1923– 1939 [1940], Berlin 1988, pp. 97–108. See also Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. Günther Maschke, Berlin 1995. 22

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Schmitt’s Nazi texts, theoretically secured by The Three Types of Juristic Thought, is expressed in the trilogy of The Order of Greater Spaces, Land and Sea and The Nomos, each illuminating the idea of land-appropriations through a different register—the legal structure of Nazi inter-regional law, the geo-mythology of the elementary distinction between land and sea, and the history of international law from the New World Discoveries onwards. How could The Nomos of the Earth, written between 1942 and 1945, and Land and Sea, published in 1942, not have been conceived as long historico-legal detours to accumulate the intellectual resources and arguments to legitimize Hitler’s Raumrevolution—a re-writing of history by one of the leading intellectuals of the ascendant Axis power? In a passage on the legal innovations and conceptual neologisms that accompany modern American imperialism, Schmitt notes that ‘he who has real power is also capable of determining concepts and words; Caesar dominus est supra grammaticam: Caesar is lord over grammar’.24 A German legal-political counter-vocabulary was required to regain existential autonomy in the geopolitical struggle for survival. This was the task of Schmitt’s fascist writings on international law.

Land grabs But ideological purpose need not nullify their message. Balakrishnan finds much to admire in The Nomos, detecting an analogy between Marx’s ‘account of the primitive accumulation of capital in great land grabs and colonial conquests’ and Schmitt’s account of the ‘Westphalian order’, premised on the division between the civilized denizens of the Old World and the uncivilized barbarians of the New. This opposition ‘expressed a world-historical expropriation of non-European peoples and territories’. But this quasi-equation of the Marxist category of ‘primitive accumulation’ with Schmitt’s notion of ‘land appropriation’ leads astray, as the former depicts a qualitative transformation of social property relations, antithetical to a quantitative, territorial notion of land grabs. Not every form of conquest, booty and plunder can be vaguely associated with the idea of the dispossession of direct producers from their means of reproduction and their transformation into abstract labour. The Discoveries did not introduce capitalism to the New World; nor were the gains from plunder overseas, which greased the wheels of mercantile Schmitt, ‘Völkerrechtliche Formen des Modernen Imperialismus’, in Positionen und Begriffe, p. 202. 24

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and colonial commerce, of importance for the rise of capitalism in the Luso-Hispanic parts of Europe, or a sufficient precondition for the origins of agrarian capitalism in England. Balakrishnan claims that ‘the nomos arising out of early-modern stateformation and overseas conquests divided the world into two zones, with two laws of war and appropriation’, concurring with Schmitt’s account of the early-modern inter-state system, and the notion of ‘bracketed’ warfare within the civilized zone. But any closer reading of The Nomos shows that Schmitt was not only deeply ambivalent in his explanation of the European system—vacillating between the Conquista (1492), the rise of the Absolutist state (1648) and English balancing (1713) as the formative moment—but that he explicitly excluded the conquests of the Americas from the constitution of early-modern Europe. His discussion of the rationalization—jurisprudential and material—of the colonization process by Spain and Portugal reveals, paradoxically, that the Conquests did not precipitate the ‘spatial revolution’ and the subsequent rise of the new European inter-state nomos that he generically associated with the enclosure processes overseas. This is most clearly expressed in his differentiation between the rayas and the amity-lines. The first repartition of the oceans after the Discoveries in the form of the rayas (divisional lines) was laid down in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, establishing a dividing line a hundred miles west of the Azores and Cape Verde: all the land west of the line should go to Spain; all the land east of it to Portugal.25 This meant the conditional territorialization of both the seas and the newly discovered lands, as required by feudal land-holding patterns and socialproperty relations.26 The Americas, the Atlantic and the Pacific remained firmly within the reach of the late-medieval law-governed cosmos of the res publica Christiana, including the papal-missionary mandate and the just-war doctrine against non-Christians. ‘The later antithesis of firm land and free sea, decisive for spatial ordering in international law from 1713–1939, was completely foreign to these divisional lines’.27 All land and sea remained jurisprudentially ‘firm’. At least formally, the Vatican was still the central supra-territorial source of adjudication in Schmitt, Land and Sea, Washington, dc 1997, p. 41; Nomos of the Earth, pp. 88–9. See Teschke, ‘Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and Theory’, International Organization, vol. 52, no. 2, 1998, pp. 325–58. 27 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 89. 25

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Catholic Europe. Against Schmitt’s express purpose—the centrality of land-appropriations for the constitution of the law-governed European inter-state civilization—he himself shows that this line was much more crooked than Balakrishnan assumes. The quantum leap to the ius inter gentes is not precipitated by the Salamanca School, but by Dutch and English secular jurisprudence, notably Grotius and Selden, in the Spanish–Dutch/English debate on mare clausum versus mare liberum. The initial post-Conquest partition of the world between the Catholic powers along the rayas was only challenged by the Spanish–French Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and the subsequent seventeenth-century Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish treaties that fixed the amity-lines, dividing the world into a civilized— law-governed—zone within these lines and an anarchic zone, a state of nature, ‘beyond the line’. This designated not only the land but also the sea ‘beyond the line’ as ‘free’ and lawless.28 Res nullius is also res omnium—up for grabs by the strongest taker. Schmitt therefore locates the decisive break from medieval-Christian to early-modern practices of spatial ordering not in the fact of the Discoveries per se, but in the transition from the Spanish–Portuguese rayas-system to the Anglo-centric amity-lines. This initiated America’s re-definition from an integrated appendix of the Euro-centric ‘Old World’ to a distinct ‘New World’ to be re-appropriated and divided in a morally neutral agonal contest according to the law of the stronger.

Flaws of the Westphalian system Of the famous ‘Westphalian peace treaties’, Schmitt hardly says anything.29 Absolutism for him referred to a state strong enough to It should be understood that the arguments for mare liberum had nothing to do with free capitalist competition, as Schmitt obscured the distinction between ‘free’ and ‘open’ seas. The notion of ‘free sea’ simply referred to its non-law-governed status and implied permanent military rivalry over the control of trading and shipping routes, as states tried unilaterally to territorialize the seas, rather than declaring them multilaterally ‘open’. Free trade across ‘open seas’ had to wait until the 19th century. 29 Three passing references can be found in Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 145; ‘Raum und Großraum im Völkerrecht’ [1940], in Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos, p. 241; ‘Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für Raumfremde Mächte’, in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, p. 311. Throughout the course of The Nomos, Schmitt progressively shortens the duration of the ius publicum, describing it as lasting ‘for 400 years’, for ‘300 years’, and finally ‘for more than two centuries’. The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 49, 140, 181. 28

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de-politicize and neutralize civil wars domestically. Its historical achievement was to have carried through and institutionalized the separation between the private—the world of clashing ultimate validity-claims— and the public, the sphere of a morally neutered raison d’État, whose overriding interest resided in the security of the state itself, the right to make war and peace. Since the Absolutist state was pre-representational or pre-parliamentarian, conceiving of itself as legibus solutus, it provided the ideal-type for Schmitt’s theory of the ‘modern state’, encapsulated in its decisionist nature, ‘absolved from law’. Correlatively, as the domestic sphere was rationalized, its international flipside led to the rationalization of inter-state conflict by means of a non-discriminatory concept of war. The rise of the ius publicum was premised on the concrete order of this state-centric spatio-political revolution. I have already expressed my disagreement with this story. Balakrishnan is nevertheless right to suggest that casualty figures in early-modern wars do not by themselves discredit the category of bracketed warfare. That, however, was only one part of my argument. Since Schmitt articulates only a legal category, he is unable to decipher the social sources of the frequency, magnitude, intensity and duration of old-regime warfare, powered by the requirements of pre-capitalist geopolitical accumulation. Equally, military praxes render Schmitt’s claim of its civilized, rationalized and humanized character implausible, given the non-compliance with the nominal conventions of war (ius in bello), the customs of recruitment, the lack of a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and the problems of provisioning.30 It remains to be clarified how the notion of ‘limited war’ can be squared with the standard historical argument that old-regime ‘permanent-war states’ succumbed to their military expenses, leading to fiscal crises, bankruptcies and state collapse. And I am still in search of an answer as to how Schmitt’s generic legal anti-positivism can be reconciled with his celebration of the efficacy and civilizing mission of the ius publicum europaeum, while Absolutist states, according to Schmitt’s own reasoning, were simultaneously ‘absolved from law’—decisionist polities. The idea of non-discriminatory warfare regulated by the ius publicum remains a fiction, designed to promote the early-modern epoch as the paragon of civilized warfare against which the subsequent descent to the liberal era of ‘total war’ can only appear as a de-civilizing perversion. 30 Bernhard Kroener, ‘The Modern State and Military Society in the Eighteenth Century’, in Philippe Contamine, War and Competition between States, Oxford 2000, pp. 195–220.

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Does Balakrishnan’s tentative endorsement of Schmitt’s protocols of land war and their alleged neutralization of the religious and civil wars stand up to historical scrutiny? Since early-modern states were not rationalized public apparatuses, but confessional dynastic-composite constructs claiming a sacralized form of sovereignty, public power was not de-theologized and neutralized. While the age of Absolutism did break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism of the Vatican, it simultaneously fragmented the unitary confessional papal claims and re-assembled them across the spectrum of a pluriverse of creedal miniabsolutisms, after 1555 and again after 1648. The Westphalian formula, cuius regio, eius religio, did not endorse religious toleration for private subjects, but sanctioned the right of regional rulers to determine and enforce the faith of the land. In the French case, the nascent Absolutist state did not simply guard over the de-politicized and neutral character of domestic politics and religion, but actively established during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion (1562–98) its Catholic Absolutism in violent, directly politicized, century-long campaigns, culminating in the repression and expulsion of the Huguenots with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Absolutism did not rise above the warring civil parties, but repressed one of them, giving rise to mono-confessionalized, even sacralized states. Balakrishnan’s acceptance of the Schmittian idea that ‘the separation of sovereign power from the promotion of partisan religious causes’ led to a ‘rationalization-neutralization of public order’ and, concomitantly, a religiously and morally neutered form of civilized war, remains within the Schmittian world. Schmitt’s whole account of the ‘Westphalian system’ is deeply flawed, empirically and theoretically. Balakrishnan concludes that my ‘historical sociology replicates the exact form of Schmitt’s fascist epic’, ‘underscoring the futility of [my] attempted demolition’.31 Setting aside the distinction between theoretically informed explanation and quasi-mythical narration—which seems to play a subordinate role in Balakrishnan’s view—this is not even minimally true on a straightforward empirical level. As sketched, my account of the rise, nature and fall of the continental system of Old Regimes— pre-modern, personalized, confessionalized, non-rationalized and constantly at war with each other—is diametrically opposed to Schmitt’s. We do converge, however, in the specificity of England. But where Schmitt senses intuitively Britain’s uniqueness, this is entirely reduced to geo-elemental categories. 31

Balakrishnan, ‘Geopolitics of Separation’, p. 11.

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England alone took the step from a medieval feudal and terrestrial existence to a purely maritime existence that balanced the whole terrestrial world . . . England thereby became the representative of the universal maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the guardian of the other side of the ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign of the balance of land and sea—of an equilibrium comprising the spatially ordered thinking of international law.32

How was that possible? England ‘turned her collective existence seawards and centred it on the sea element’, turning into a big fish—a leviathan.33 The problem with Schmitt’s ‘fascist epic’ is precisely that—it is fascist and it is an epic.

Reification of the geopolitical Schmitt concludes The Nomos of the Earth—in its English edition—by returning to his opening philosophical question: what is the nomos? The Greek etymological derivation of the meaning of the term produces a tripartite distinction: to take, to divide, to pasture—appropriation, distribution, production (cultivation). It is their interrelation that structures any concrete historical nomos. The question for Schmitt is how they should be ordered: ‘Their sequence and evaluation have followed changes in historical situations and world history as a whole’, but ‘all known and famous appropriations in history, all great conquests— wars and occupations, colonizations, migrations and discoveries—have evidenced the fundamental precedence of appropriation before distribution and production’, establishing radical title to land.34 Appropriation, whether vertical or horizontal, is timeless and primary. This held, Schmitt qualifies, until the Industrial Revolution. Thereafter, liberalism and socialism attempted to reverse this sequence by assigning primacy to production. Liberalism claimed to transcend appropriation by the promise of the production of plenty, constructing a utopia of production and consumption cruelly deflated by world history. Socialism grounded re-distribution in a revolutionary act of re-appropriation: the expropriation of the appropriators at home and abroad. Schmitt concludes that the horizontal relations of land-appropriations— geopolitics—precede the vertical relations of production and Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 173. Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 28. 34 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 327–8. 32 33

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distribution—political economy. In close syntactical analogy to Marx and Engels’s famous dictum that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, Schmitt argues that ‘world history is the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers, and by land powers against sea or maritime powers’.35 History is conceived as a lateral field of geopolitical appropriations, unreconciled to the vertical dynamics of surplus appropriation. Schmitt’s international history is a deliberately anti-sociological project, seeking to validate the autonomy of political and geopolitical order over and against social conflicts and dislocations. Schmitt’s mythologically essentialized ontology overwhelms his historicism and regresses into the reification of geopolitics as such. In the end, Schmitt failed to answer his own research-organizing question: what processes drive land-appropriation—what establishes a nomos? The answer does not reside in a simple reversal of Schmitt’s sequence of appropriation, distribution and production, but in a hist­ orical examination of the politically constituted and contested property relations that generate differential constellations of authority, sovereignty and geopolitics. If the concluding section of The Nomos reveals Schmitt’s ulterior reference point and motivation, an anti-Marx for his times, then the future does not consist in a facile turning of the tables: an anti-Schmitt for our times. Rather, it forces us to meet the Schmittian challenge and to develop a theoretical programme that pursues a radical historicization and socialization of geopolitics—theoretically outside of, but empirically incorporating, that mega-abstraction of concrete-orderthinking: ‘land-appropriation’.

35

Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 5.

andrew bacevich

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resident kennedy was categorical on the subject. Speaking at American University in Washington, dc on June 10, 1963, he put it this way: ‘The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.’ Twenty years later, President Reagan concurred. ‘The defence policy of the United States’, he told Americans on March 23, 1983, ‘is based on a simple premise: the United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.’ Given such authoritative (and bipartisan) assurances, how then can we explain the George W. Bush administration’s promulgation of a doctrine of preventive war at the start of the 21st century? The simple answer, of course, is that 9/11 changed everything. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage articulated a feeling that was widespread among Americans after the events of September 11: ‘History starts today.’1 All bets were off. So too were the gloves. Deterrence and defence no longer sufficed. As President Bush himself put it, ‘the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold water.’ Self-protection was not good enough. In Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s typically crisp formulation, ‘the best, and in some cases, the only defence, is a good offence.’2 This was one of those cases. In order to prevent another 9/11—or something even more nightmarish—the United States had no choice but to go permanently on the offensive. With the Bush Doctrine, Washington granted itself the authority to do just that. End of story. But the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Bush Doctrine possesses a considerable provenance. Its gestation period coincided with the Age of Overkill—the years when authorities in Washington made nuclear-strike capacity the cornerstone of us national security policy and then, more or less as an afterthought, assessed the implications of having done so. The effort to wrestle with those implications, which turned out to be vast and troublesome, gave birth to a new tradition of strategic thought.

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Acknowledging the influence of its chief midwife, Albert Wohlstetter, that tradition can rightly be called the Wohlstetter School. A filmmaker attempting a behind-the-scenes portrayal of us strategy in the nuclear age would surely give Albert Wohlstetter a place of prominence—although that place would likely be a bland faculty lounge instead of the Pentagon’s bells-and-whistles War Room. Wohlstetter was the quintessential defence intellectual. From the 1950s through the 1990s, he wielded outsized influence in policy circles, without himself ever shouldering the burdens of personal responsibility—an outsider enjoying privileged inside access. Born in New York in 1913, he was a mathematician by training, who rose to prominence while an analyst at rand, which he joined in 1951. (rand also employed his wife, the historian Roberta Wohlstetter.) In 1964, Wohlstetter joined the political science faculty at the University of Chicago. There he remained for the rest of his career, training acolytes (among them Paul Wolfowitz) and mentoring protégés (among them Richard Perle), while engaging in classified research, advising government agencies and serving on blueribbon commissions—in general leaving his fingerprints all over the intellectual framework of us national-security strategy. ‘Paul thinks the way Albert thinks’, Perle once remarked, referring to his friend Wolfowitz.3 This comment applied equally to more than a few others who rose to positions of prominence in Washington during the latter half of the twentieth century. In national security circles, Albert’s way of thinking became pervasive. So too did the abiding theme of his work: the existing situation is bad; absent drastic action today, it is almost sure to get worse still tomorrow. To those who learned from, collaborated with, or drew inspiration from Albert Wohlstetter, therefore, any defensive posture by definition is either inadequate or soon will be. The defender forfeits the initiative, a defensive orientation too easily translating into passivity, inertia and even fatalism. In an age in which survival required constant alertness and continuing exertion to improve existing capabilities and devise new ones, to rely on defence alone as a basis for strategy was to incur great risk. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, New York 2004. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, ‘For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized’, Washington Post, 7 April 2003; Donald Rumsfeld, ‘Speech at the National Defense University’, 31 January 2002. 3 Neil Swidey, ‘The Analyst’, Boston Globe, 18 May 2003. 1

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For members of the Wohlstetter School, the advent of the Bush Doctrine represented the culmination of a project that they had pursued over the course of decades. Long before the events of September 2001, ideas they had developed set the stage for the United States to embrace preventive war. For Wohlstetter’s adherents, the proactive elimination of threats—thereby transcending concepts such as containment and deterrence—had long since acquired a tantalizing allure all of its own. Well before 9/11 they had persuaded themselves that preventive war was not only desirable but also feasible. All that was needed was an opportunity to put their theories into practice. On September 11, 2001, that opportunity presented itself.

Taking the offensive Commencement ceremonies for the graduating cadets at West Point on June 1, 2002 provided the occasion for Bush to unveil his doctrine of preventive war. Bush began by paying tribute to Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Rather than recalling their assurances that the United States would never start a war, however, he praised them for refusing ‘to gloss over the brutality of tyrants’ and giving ‘hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles.’ In a difficult time, they had held high the torch of freedom. In some respects, the challenges now confronting the United States mirrored those that his Cold War predecessors had faced. ‘Now, as then’, Bush declared, ‘our enemies are totalitarians . . . Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.’ Yet in other crucial respects, the present situation was entirely new and fraught with unprecedented danger. Bush located the nexus of that danger ‘at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology.’ Against such a threat, Cold War strategies no longer sufficed. ‘Containment is not possible’, the President continued, ‘when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.’ In such circumstances, defence alone was inadequate to provide security. Passivity was tantamount to courting suicide. ‘If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.’ New conditions had rendered the promises of Kennedy and Reagan null and void. ‘We must take the battle to the enemy’, Bush continued, ‘disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation

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will act.’ Action necessarily implied military action, and the President emphasized the imperative of transforming the armed forces to create a military ‘ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world’ and prepared ‘for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.’ Military forces in action would eliminate the terrorist threat; military might in itself would guarantee the peace: ‘America has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond challenge . . . thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.’ Lending this happy prospect a modicum of plausibility were newly emergent methods of waging war—precise, agile, flexible and discriminating—which Bush thought would endow us forces with hitherto unimagined levels of effectiveness. Released from the paralysing effects of Hiroshima, war—undertaken by Americans for enlightened purposes—would acquire a new lease of life, the United States seizing the moment, in Bush’s words, ‘to extend a just peace, by replacing poverty, repression and resentment around the world’. The Bush Doctrine promised both to unharness American power and to invest it with renewed moral purpose. However unwittingly, Bush had thereby summarized and endorsed the several principles of the Wohlstetter School. The implementation of the Bush Doctrine in the months and years that followed put those principles to the test.

Peril and surprise Four essential precepts define the Wohlstetter tradition. The theme of the first is looming peril. According to its adherents, America’s enemies, strong and getting stronger, are implacably hostile and will, if given the chance, exploit any perceived us vulnerability; to make matters worse, us officials responsible for evaluating the threats bearing down on the country routinely underestimate the actual danger, lulling the American people into a false sense of security. In reality, crisis is a permanent condition, the threats facing the United States imminent and existential. The theme of the second precept is surprise, which greatly complicates the problem of how to gauge the danger. The prospect of the unforeseen is omnipresent and can never be entirely eliminated. Although efforts to guard against being caught unawares are essential, to assume that those efforts are succeeding is to invite

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disaster. Only those defences that will work in the absence of warning can be deemed sufficient. Minimizing the impact of surprise demands sustained and intensive attention to risk management: this is the Wohlstetter School’s third precept. Conjuring up vulnerabilities that adversaries might exploit, crediting them with the ability and intent to do so, devising remedies to prevent or reduce any resulting damage, thereby maintaining the ability to strike back and raising the risks that adversaries will incur if choosing to attack: this for Wohlstetter’s followers defines the very essence of strategy. Effective risk management entails activism. To remain inert in the face of peril is to forfeit the initiative, thereby exacerbating the threat. To see some momentary advantage as a guarantee of safety, therefore, is to misapprehend the reality of strategic competition, which involves continuous interaction on ever-shifting terms. In other words, the first precept of looming peril necessitates an anticipatory approach to self-defence. Yet the second precept of surprise means that an anticipatory self-defence that is strictly defensive in its orientation can never be fully satisfactory. Miscalculate just once—fail to see what lurks around the corner or over the horizon—and catastrophic failure ensues. The fourth precept looks beyond mere risk management to radical risk reduction—the Holy Grail of the Wohlstetter School. It posits the existence of capabilities that will confer upon the United States the ability not only to dispose of the perils it faces, but to create a better world for all. To achieve this sort of risk reduction requires an offensively oriented approach. Rather than simply parrying, the us should thrust. For a brief moment after 1945, some observers believed that the American nuclear monopoly had put the United States in a position to do just that. The founding members of the Wohlstetter School were among the first to recognize that this was a delusion and to see that far from enhancing us freedom of action, the advent of nuclear weapons created daunting complications and imposed constraints. Yet this insight, important in itself, did not dissuade them from seeking escape from those constraints. By the 1990s, leading Wohlstetterites believed they had discovered the means to do so.

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nsc-68 and after Just as McCarthyism predated Senator Joe McCarthy, so too ideas of the Wohlstetter School made their appearance even before Albert Wohlstetter signed on with rand in 1951 to analyse nuclear strategy. Drafted early in 1950, National Security Council Report 68 remains a classic expression of the looming-threat precept. Emphasizing that the end of the nuclear monopoly had plunged the United States into deepest peril, with all of humanity now facing ‘the ever-present possibility of annihilation’, freedom itself ‘mortally challenged’, and the very survival ‘not only of this Republic but of civilization itself’ hanging in the balance, nsc-68 may strike present-day readers as overwrought, if not altogether hysterical. With the Soviet Union having long since ceased to exist, the United States today finds itself more or less perpetually entangled in foreign wars, all the while professing a yearning for peace. Viewed from this perspective, nsc-68’s attempted contrast between the ‘fanatic faith’ inspiring the Kremlin’s efforts to ‘impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world’ and the ‘essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations’ might seem overdrawn.4 Yet Paul Nitze, director of State Department policy planning and nsc68’s principal author—soon to emerge as a charter member of the Wohlstetter School—believed otherwise. By his own account, Nitze was simply looking facts in the face. A self-described hard-nosed pragmatist, he addressed questions of policy with ‘clear and rigorous logic, based upon a cold and unemotional assessment of the objective evidence.’5 If Nitze cried wolf, it was because a wolf (or perhaps a bear) was pawing at the door, even if others remained blind to the danger. With a little help from the Korean War, nsc-68 demonstrated that in Cold War Washington crying wolf worked: Nitze won approval for his recommendation of a large-scale build-up of American military power, conventional as well as nuclear. At regular intervals thereafter, groups— some quasi-official, others unofficial, many including Nitze himself as a prominent participant—sought to replicate this achievement. Every couple of decades, the Committee on the Present Danger appeared on the scene, version 1.0 sounding the alarm in 1950, with 2.0 following in 1976 and 3.0 in 2004. Otherwise, even as the names varied, the refrain remained 4 5

nsc-68, ‘us Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950. Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, New York 1989, p. ix.

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constant. The Gaither Committee (1957), the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy (1969), ‘Team B’ (1976), the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1988), and the Rumsfeld Commission (1998) all subscribed to a common set of propositions: ignored or discounted by us intelligence agencies, the United States was falling behind and America’s enemies were gaining an edge; absent prompt action to close the resulting capabilities gap, catastrophe beckoned. An accommodating press routinely amplified the ominous warnings issued by the Wohlstetter School. When the classified findings of the Gaither Committee found their way into the hands of a Washington Post reporter, for example, the resulting story, appearing on December 20, 1958, carried the headline: ‘Secret Report Sees us in Great Peril’. Team B concluded its work as President Ford was preparing to leave office. In its January 10, 1977 issue, Newsweek’s coverage featured an essay called ‘The Russian Bear Redux?’ The text of the article removed the question mark, describing the Team B report as ‘the most alarming forecast in years’. Similarly, on July 17, 1998, the Newark Star-Ledger summarized the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission: ‘Experts See Missiles’ Shadows Darkening Skies over us Cities.’ The point here is not to contest the accuracy of these forecasts—though allegations of a ‘bomber gap’ and later of a ‘missile gap’ during the 1950s proved utterly fanciful—but to note their remarkable consistency. In this regard, the findings reported by Team B—convened by cia director George H. W. Bush in response to charges by Wohlstetter (and others) that official estimates were understating the Soviet threat—are representative. As an exercise in intellectual inquiry, Team B’s investigation was the equivalent of asking a group of senior academics to evaluate the pros and cons of tenure: the outcome was foreordained. Consisting of hardliners vociferously opposed to Soviet–American détente (Nitze and Wohlstetter protégé Paul Wolfowitz among them), Team B reached precisely the conclusions it would be expected to reach: us intelligence agencies had ‘substantially misperceived the motives behind Soviet strategic programmes, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope and implicit threat.’ With ‘all the evidence point[ing] to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called “the worldwide triumph of socialism” but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony’, the Kremlin had no interest in settling for strategic equivalence. It was engaged in a single-minded

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pursuit of strategic supremacy. ‘Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded’, Team B reported. That statement applied in spades to Soviet thinking about nuclear weapons. The Soviets did not view nuclear conflict as tantamount to mutual suicide. Instead, they were expanding their arsenal in order to achieve a ‘warfighting and war-winning capability’. For the United States, the outlook was grim indeed.6 Wohlstetter himself drafted the most beguiling and comprehensive articulation of the looming-peril hypothesis. Written under Federal contract for rand in 1958 and subsequently appearing in revised form in Foreign Affairs, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’ qualifies in the estimation of one admirer as ‘probably the single most important article in the history of American strategic thought’.7 In late 1957 the ussr had launched Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. As Wohlstetter noted, the shock resulting from this demonstration of Soviet missile capabilities had ‘almost dissipated’, however. American concern, momentarily bordering on panic, had subsided, with the prevailing assumption that a general thermonuclear war was ‘extremely unlikely’ restored. Wohlstetter set out to demolish that assumption, ‘dispelling the nearly universal optimism about the stability of deterrence’. The requirements for thwarting a Soviet nuclear attack, which in his view were stringent, made such optimism entirely unwarranted. To assume that the Kremlin leadership was ‘bumbling or, better, cooperative’—adhering to what he derisively referred to as ‘Western-preferred Soviet strategies’—was sheer folly. In fact, advances in Soviet strike capabilities had created prospects of ‘an essentially warningless attack’ that the United States ‘may not have the power to deter’.8 What followed was, in effect, a riff on Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies. Elaborating on the difficulties of maintaining a viable secondstrike capability, Wohlstetter found no reason to doubt that Soviet leaders possessed the cunning and ruthlessness to exploit those difficulties to their own advantage. The possibility of nuclear war causing considerable damage to the Soviet Union itself would not, in his view, Report of Team B, ‘Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternate View’, undated. 7 Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, Princeton 1991, p. 20. 8 Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Carlisle, pa 2009, pp. 177–212. 6

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dissuade the Kremlin from acting. After all, although World War ii had killed more than 20 million Russians, the Soviet Union ‘had recovered extremely well’. Under ‘several quite plausible circumstances’, he surmised, ‘the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage to considerably less than this number’, in which event, ‘striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them’. In short, to imagine that ‘a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost effortlessly’, with Americans thereby resuming ‘their deep pre-Sputnik sleep’, was a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, shoring up the us deterrent required urgent, ongoing and intensive effort: ensuring the survivability of retaliatory forces, thickening air defences, protecting civilians, improving conventional capabilities and exploring innovative non-nuclear modes of warfare, hitherto ‘financed by pitifully small budgets’. Yet in outlining the minimum requirements for avoiding nuclear war in the 1960s—which he viewed as an iffy prospect at best—Wohlstetter was also describing ‘a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger’. Responding to Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies would oblige Americans to make hard choices entailing sacrifice and uncertainty. It also implied being kept in the dark about matters said to determine their chances of survival, while placing their fate in the hands of those claiming mastery of such matters—people like Albert Wohlstetter.

Anticipating Pearl Harbour A treatise written by Roberta Wohlstetter has long served as the Wohlstetter School’s ur-text on the issue of surprise. Pearl Harbour: Warning and Decision, prepared under the auspices of rand and published in 1962, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history; but this was history narrowly focused to serve—and privilege—a specific agenda. Pearl Harbour was written in order to answer the question: why was the United States surprised on December 7, 1941? In retrospect, indicators of an impending Japanese attack seemed blindingly obvious. How could Americans at all echelons of command—civilian and military alike, both in Washington and in Hawaii—have overlooked so many clues? Wohlstetter’s answer emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing between the clues that mattered and those that did not: ‘we failed to anticipate Pearl Harbour not for want of the relevant materials, but because of the plethora of irrelevant ones’.9 What Roberta Wohlstetter 9

Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour: Warning and Decision, Stanford 1962, p. 387.

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described as noise—false or misleading information—obscured the signals that foretold an attack. In ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, her husband had identified six hurdles that the United States needed to overcome in order to achieve the assured second-strike capability required for effective deterrence, so as to demonstrate the enormous challenges involved.10 In Pearl Harbour, Roberta Wohlstetter likewise identified six hurdles, factors increasing a nation’s susceptibility to surprise attack: false alarms; alertness dulled by continuous tension; enemy efforts to conceal their true intent; spoofs: enemy-generated noise designed to mislead; changes in the character of relevant intelligence, caused, for example, by technological advances; and bureaucratic barriers obstructing the sharing of relevant information.11 Roberta Wohlstetter’s point reinforced her husband’s: avoiding surprise, like creating an effective deterrent, was a very difficult proposition indeed. The one major practical lesson of her study was that ‘we cannot count on strategic warning.’ In the two decades that had elapsed since Pearl Harbour, she concluded, ‘the balance of advantage’ had clearly shifted ‘in favour of a surprise attacker. The benefits to be expected from achieving surprise have increased enormously and the penalties for losing the initiative in an all-out war have grown correspondingly.’ As a consequence, the United States needed to acknowledge the likelihood of being surprised. ‘We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it.’ Rather than expecting advance notice of an enemy attack, defences ‘must be designed to function without it’.12 Events of 1962, the very year in which her book appeared, seemingly confirmed Roberta Wohlstetter’s analysis. Soviet efforts to position a nuclear-strike force in Cuba caught the Kennedy administration completely unawares. Writing in Foreign Affairs three years after the fact, she described it as a case of déjà vu. Once again, in October 1962 as in December 1941, there had been plenty of signals, but also an abundance of noise. Thanks to advances in aerial photography, notably from the U-2 spy plane, and the nuanced response of President Kennedy, the United These were: attainment of ‘a stable, steady-state peacetime operation’; surviving an enemy first-strike; making and disseminating a decision to retaliate; reaching enemy territory with fuel enough to complete the mission; overcoming enemy defences; and destroying assigned targets; A. Wohlstetter, ‘Delicate Balance’, pp. 185–7. 11 R. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour, pp. 393–4. 12 R. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour, pp. 399–401. 10

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States managed to recover from its initial surprise and avoid World War

iii. She found it ‘comforting to know that we do learn from one crisis to the next’. Muting that comfort was her conviction that ‘the future doubtless holds many more shocks and attempts at surprise’, with no reason to assume that next time the United States would be so lucky.13

Strategy precluded Wohlstetter’s analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis mirrors her analysis of the attack on Pearl Harbour in this additional respect: in both cases, she imputed strategic significance to actions that occur in the realm of tactics. Among adherents to the Wohlstetter School, this tendency is pervasive: a preoccupation with tactical matters—relabelled ‘strategic’ to reflect the involvement of nuclear weapons or long-range delivery systems— supplants serious strategic analysis. So Wohlstetter begins her account of the Cuban Missile Crisis on August 31, 1962, when Senator Kenneth Keating of New York charged that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba, thereby posing a threat to the United States. (The Kennedy administration dismissed Keating’s charge.) She evinces no interest in events occurring prior to that date. In her account, therefore, ciaengineered efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, collapsing the year before at the Bay of Pigs, go unmentioned. So too does the Cuban Revolution, its origins and purposes. Implicitly, for Wohlstetter, the Cuban Missile Crisis came out of nowhere, making it unnecessary for her to ask if ill-advised us policies prior to 1962 might have laid the basis for the surprise that Castro and his allies in the Kremlin sprung in the autumn of that year. By extension, that same presumption foreclosed any need to consider whether Washington’s vulnerability to surprise might stem less from lapses in us intelligence than from misguided us behaviour toward Cuba. In framing the problem as a failure to distinguish between signals and noise, Wohlstetter disregarded the possibility that the problem might be one that the United States had brought upon itself—decades of meddling and manipulation producing unhappy consequences to which policymakers remained wilfully blind. In short, for her, strategy as such—how Washington had defined us interests in Cuba and the prerogatives it had claimed in pursuing those interests—evaded serious scrutiny. R. Wohlstetter, ‘Cuba and Pearl Harbour: Hindsight and Foresight’, Foreign Affairs, July 1965. 13

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Much the same applies to her account of Pearl Harbour. Preoccupied with explaining the origins of the Japanese attack on December 7, Wohlstetter evinces no interest in assessing the origins of the Pacific War. She pays no attention whatsoever to developments prior to June 17, 1940, while focusing in detail only on events that occurred in November and December 1941. Again, strategy as such—how Washington defined its interests in the Asia-Pacific and the policies that put the United States on a collision course with Japan, beginning with the promulgation of the Open Door Notes in 1899–1900 and culminating in the summer of 1940 with the imposition of economic sanctions to punish Japan— simply does not qualify as relevant.14 To characterize the Pearl Harbour attack as a strategic failure—whether of ‘warning’ or ‘decision’, to cite the subtitle of Wohlstetter’s book—is to abuse and misconstrue the word ‘strategy’. Washington’s actual strategic failure, its inability to persuade Japan to accept America’s requirements for an Asian-Pacific order by means short of war, had become evident long before the first bombs fell on Oahu. When open hostilities finally erupted, the particulars of time and place may have come as a surprise; that the United States was already engaged in a winner-takes-all contest with the Japanese did not. To impute strategic significance to the events of December 7, 1941, therefore, serves no purpose other than to insulate basic us policy from critical attention. This members of the Wohlstetter School consistently do. Whether the issue at hand is the origins of the Pacific War, the Cold War or the War on Terror, their fixation with the perils lying just ahead obviates any need to consider whether the United States itself may have had a hand in creating those dangers.

Rooting out risk The Wohlstetter School’s preoccupation with risk management derives in part from the conviction that passivity in the face of a building and A partial list of the events creating the conditions for the Pacific War would necessarily include the following: us involvement in negotiating the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War; blatant and widespread American discrimination against Japanese immigrants; Woodrow Wilson’s rejection of a Japanese-proposed endorsement of racial equality in the Versailles Treaty; the 1922 Washington Naval Conference; us condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931; the Stimson Doctrine refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Japanese conquests; us support for China in its war against Japan; and the 1940 Export Control Act, blocking the shipment to Japan of aircraft parts, machine tools, scrap iron and steel. 14

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evolving threat almost inevitably increases vulnerability, whereas wellconceived action can reduce it. ‘The problem of deterring a major power’, wrote Albert Wohlstetter in 1961, ‘requires a continuing effort because the requirements for deterrence will change with the counter-measures taken by the major power.’15 The imperative is to keep one step ahead in order to avoid falling a potentially fatal half-step behind. Staying ahead necessarily entails intensive, ongoing exertions, anticipating the adversary’s next moves, and devising methods and capabilities from which to formulate a counter. Action undertaken to reduce risk necessarily entails a further element of risk, which is difficult to forecast (and easy to exaggerate). Yet members of the Wohlstetter School do not shrink from action, convinced that the risk of inaction could well be greater still. Persuading a skeptical public and skittish politicians to buy into this proposition can pose challenges. Writing in Life magazine in 1960, Albert Wohlstetter saw ‘no reason to believe that Americans would not make a greater effort for the major purposes which they share, if they understood that the risks of not making such an effort were large and the rewards for effort great.’ Americans seemed to think that by trying to stay that step ahead, they could forfeit all the benefits accruing from the country’s advantageous postwar position; ‘I think this is wrong’, Wohlstetter wrote. ‘They are threatened by the risks involved in failing to make an effort.’16 Viewed from this perspective, the strategist’s task is twofold: creating policy options to facilitate action, while nurturing a political environment conducive to the actual exercise of choice. Analysis was ‘about the invention of new solutions’, wrote one admirer, describing Wohlstetter’s modus operandi: ‘out of analysis emerged new choices.’17 Yet just as the absence of options could inhibit activism, so too could public unwillingness to defer to those at the centre of power. Avoiding strategic paralysis required not only a rich menu of policy choices but also public willingness to let decision-makers choose. With these twin tasks in mind, members of the Wohlstetter School have long specialized in concocting scenarios purporting to expose existing us defences as grotesquely inadequate—according to Nitze, A. Wohlstetter, ‘Nuclear Sharing: nato and the n+1 Country’, Foreign Affairs, April 1961. 16 A. Wohlstetter, ‘No Highway to High Purpose’, Life, 20 June 1960. 17 Alain Enthoven, ‘Commentary: On Nuclear Deterence’, Nuclear Heuristics, p. 167. 15

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for example, the Gaither Committee ‘calculated that 90 per cent of our bomber force could be knocked out on the ground by a surprise Soviet bomber attack’—and then proposing ways to fix whatever problem they had conjured up.18 Almost invariably, making things right imposes considerable demands on the us Treasury. But as Wohlstetter put it, ‘the initiation fee is merely a down payment on the expense of membership in the nuclear club’.19 So during the Cold War, adopting Wohlstetter School recommendations on whether to disperse us bomber forces, harden missile launch sites, improve air defences, or field new weapons—the list goes on—provided a continuing rationale for high levels of military spending, with implications not lost on the officer corps, members of Congress, corporate chieftains or union bosses. Simply put, ideas generated by the Wohlstetter School produced lubricants that kept the wheels of the national-security state turning, while also helping to fuel the military–industrial complex. When it came to spotting (or inventing) flaws in us defences, Albert Wohlstetter himself possessed a rare talent. His approach to framing and addressing problems was empirical, comprehensive and uncompromising. Never content with generalities, Wohlstetter insisted that ‘actual details—missile accuracies, reliabilities and payloads, bomb yields, bomber ranges’, and the like mattered, indeed, were of central importance.20 Sloppy or lazy thinking—for example, expectations that the horrors implicit in thermonuclear war might suffice to preclude its occurrence—drew his particular ire. ‘Relentless questioning of everything and everyone’ was Richard Perle’s description. Wohlstetter demanded rigour and precision. He tested assumptions. He challenged conventional wisdom wherever he found it. ‘All this is familiar’, he would say, when preparing to demolish the latest bit of comforting nonsense to which Washington had succumbed, ‘but is it true?’21 In the eyes of his admirers, Wohlstetter was above all a disinterested seeker of truth. In reality, Wohlstetter’s reputed penchant for relentless probing extended only so far. For starters, he left untouched key assumptions undergirding Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, p. 167. A. Wohlstetter, ‘Nuclear Sharing’, p. 276. 20 Enthoven, ‘Commentary’, p. 167. 21 Richard Perle, ‘Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition’s Reality’, Nuclear Heuristics, pp. 384, 381. 18

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Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies. To Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union was a black box. While categorizing the Soviet regime as totalitarian, he never bothered to evaluate either the validity of that label nor to question whether any such abbreviated characterization could provide an adequate basis for gauging state behaviour. Furthermore, neither he nor any other member of the Wohlstetter School ever paused to wonder what it was that made the United States itself tick. The ‘relentless questioning’ so evident when probing contradictions in the us nuclear posture has never extended to us policy more broadly. Accepting at face value the prevailing American self-image of a nation whose purposes are benign and intentions peaceful, the Wohlstetter School does not trouble itself over how the United States got enmeshed in whatever predicament it happens to be facing. Thus, while promoting stratagems to navigate through the perils of the moment, members of the Wohlstetter School remain oblivious to the role that ill-conceived us policies may have played in creating those dangers. As a consequence, an approach to strategy purporting to expand choice actually serves to circumscribe it, reducing strategy itself to a stylized process that Wohlstetter termed ‘opposed-systems analysis’.22 Attributing supreme importance to matters such as ‘payloads, bomb yields and bomber ranges’ obviates the need to examine the near-term benefits and long-term consequences of, say, plotting to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Iran; obstructing the non-violent unification of a divided Vietnam; or refusing to allow Cubans to determine their own destiny. Actually existing strategy—power expended in accordance with a discernible pattern—disappears behind a cloud of obfuscation.

Discriminate deterrence? The search for a Holy Grail derives its allure not simply from the value of the object sought, but from the challenges inherent in the quest. For the Wohlstetter School, the Holy Grail of radical risk reduction in lieu of mere risk management has proven elusive, with the pursuit itself not without disappointment. Early efforts to implement this fourth precept of the Wohlstetter School foundered in Indochina. There, variants of ‘opposed-systems analysis’ found expression in us attempts to coerce Wohlstetter, ‘Theory and Opposed-Systems Design’ (1968), Nuclear Heuristics, p. 157. 22

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the North Vietnamese into accepting the permanent division of their country. Active us participation in the Vietnam War, beginning in the 1950s and ending in the 1970s, spanned five presidential administrations. None of the five attempted to win the war outright. Rather the United States relied on indirect means or calibrated violence, expecting Hanoi, either worn down or brought to its senses, eventually to concede the point. At issue was more than simply the fate of South Vietnam. Success in Vietnam would demonstrate that the United States possessed the ability to nip problems in the bud without exorbitant expenditures and without breaching the nuclear threshold. Such an outcome would notably enhance American power. To put it mildly, however, success was not forthcoming. For a time, Vietnam seemed, in the words of one keen observer, to be ‘the Waterloo for the entire enterprise of strategic analysis’.23 Albert Wohlstetter, for one, refused to accept this verdict. ‘Of all the disasters of Vietnam’, he warned in 1968, ‘the worst may be the “lessons” that we’ll draw from it’. In his estimation, the worst lesson of all would be one persuading Americans that ‘we are better off reducing the choices available to us’ rather than devising new ways ‘to use our power discriminately and for worthy ends’.24 The reference to the discriminate use of power should be noted. So too should the reference to worthy ends. Among the various signatures of the Vietnam War—free-fire zones, napalm, Agent Orange and carpet bombing by B-52 Stratofortresses— none were suggestive of power used discriminately or, indeed, worthily. Yet in that war Wohlstetter glimpsed the inkling of a vision for investing force with unprecedented efficacy, thereby reducing both moral and political inhibitions to its use. The first generation of what we today call precision-guided munitions made their appearance on the battle­field during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. For the American military, the implications of this advance in weaponry were tactical—making possible, for example, the assured destruction of one North Vietnamese bridge by a single aircraft employing a single bomb, rather than numerous aircraft unleashing a hail of bombs with uncertain result. In Wohlstetter’s eyes, the potential 23 24

Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York 1983, p. 336. A. Wohlstetter, ‘On Vietnam and Bureaucracy’, rand, 17 July 1968.

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implications of precision weapons appeared much larger. In his view, advanced technology could expand the utility of force across a range of contingencies, even while reducing both risks and moral hazards. If Hiroshima had transformed the sword of military might into a sledgehammer possessing limited utility, Wohlstetter now saw the possibility of converting the sledgehammer into a scalpel with multiple applications. Here lay the possibility of escaping from the frustrations and uncertainties of deterrent strategies relying on nuclear weapons. To put it another way, it was an opportunity to impart to anticipatory self-defence an offensive orientation.25 During the 1970s and 1980s, Wohlstetter and like-minded figures such as Defense Department officials Andrew Marshall and Fred Iklé, along with Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, closed in on their Holy Grail, now described as ‘discriminate deterrence’. The central idea was this: by enabling the United States to make highly effective attacks with low collateral damage, the advent of near zero-miss non-nuclear weapons promised to provide policymakers with a variety of strategic-response options as alternatives to massive nuclear destruction. By eliminating the unintended killing of non-combatants and the excessive physical destruction that made nuclear weapons essentially unusable, improvements in accuracy promised to make possible ‘the strategic use of non-nuclear weapons’.26 As members of the Wohlstetter School explored the prospects of ‘discriminate deterrence’ to check a Soviet Union that they described as on the march, the actually existing Soviet Union was entering its death spiral. Even before revolutionary technologies could supersede nuclear weapons, revolutionary change in the realm of politics brought the Cold War to an abrupt end, rendering ‘discriminate deterrence’ obsolete even before it reached maturity. Yet in this moment of sudden technological and political change, the shackles hitherto limiting American freedom of action fell away. No sooner had discriminate deterrence become passé than discriminate attack began to emerge as an idea whose time had come. Back in 1958, Albert Wohlstetter had speculated about a situation in which ‘the risks of not striking might at some juncture appear very great to the Soviets’, creating circumstances in which 25 A. Wohlstetter, ‘Strength, Interest, and New Technologies’ (1968), Nuclear Heuristics, pp. 524–50. 26 Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence [1988: extract], Nuclear Heuristics, p. 607.

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‘striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them, and from their point of view the smaller risk’.27 With the end of the Cold War and the advent of precision weapons, this might describe the situation facing the United States. For members of the Wohlstetter School, the appeal of striking first—fixing problems, rather than merely coping with them—glittered.

Targeting the Balkans George W. Bush would refer, in his second Inaugural Address, to the interval between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror as ‘years of repose, years of sabbatical’. Some repose, some sabbatical. The 1990s opened with war in the Persian Gulf, which, despite the putative success of Operation Desert Storm, dragged on for years. A policy of coercive containment directed against the Saddam Hussein regime found expression in a never-ending sequence of feints, demonstrations and punitive air strikes, reinforcements for draconian economic sanctions. The decade also included a host of lesser interventions, beginning in 1992 with Somalia and culminating in 1999 with Kosovo, all euphemistically referred to as ‘military operations other than war’. Meanwhile, Big Thinkers vied with one another to divine the implications of the Cold War’s passing. They announced the end of history, proclaimed the arrival of a unipolar moment, worried about the coming anarchy, warned of a clash of civilizations and found hope in the prospects of globalization creating a fast, flat, wide-open and wealthgenerating world. In Washington, consensus reigned on one point only: having gained unprecedented and unquestioned military supremacy, the United States needed to preserve it. How best to maximize the benefits of us military pre-eminence became a point of considerable disagreement. One view, found in a 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, advocated unambiguous and unapologetic us global dominion. A second view, styled as assertive multilateralism or humanitarian interventionism, sought to put American military might to work on behalf of others. In effect, the Wohlstetter School fashioned a third position bridging the differences between the two: activism on behalf of others to legitimate and sustain us global hegemony. 27

A. Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance’, p. 188.

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The long Balkan crisis, unfolding in fits and starts throughout the 1990s, provided the occasion for members of the Wohlstetter School to refine this third view. Here, it seemed, was a made-to-order chance to employ American power discriminately and for worthy ends. No one made the case for doing so with greater conviction and passion than Albert Wohlstetter himself. In the final years of his life, he published a string of scathing opinion pieces denouncing the West’s fumbling reaction to horrific ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Europeans against Europeans in the former Yugoslavia. For decades, Wohlstetter had mocked anyone not sharing his view that nuclear deterrence was a complicated and problematic business. Now he mocked anyone who worried that using high-tech weapons might prove complicated and problematic. The stakes, Wohlstetter insisted, could hardly be higher. The collapse of Communism had not eased the threats facing the United States; it had heightened them. To find reassurance in the fact that the ‘canonical attack’—a Warsaw Pact assault on nato, escalating into all-out nuclear warfare—was not going to happen reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Cold War had been about in the first place. That ‘apocalyptic danger—if it ever existed—had dwindled to a negligible likelihood more than three decades ago’, Wohlstetter now announced. At the very moment when his ‘Delicate Balance’ was winning acclaim as the latest in cutting-edge thinking, ‘threatening an unrestrained nuclear war against populations’ had already become ‘plainly a loony alternative’. The real concern even in the 1960s, it now turned out, had never been a nuclear holocaust; it was the prospect of disorder ‘in places like the flanks of Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the trans-Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia’. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, disorder was now in full flood, signifying in Wohlstetter’s estimation ‘the total collapse of us policy in the critical Gulf region’.28 The us and European response to the Balkan crisis—which Wohlstetter described as ‘craven’, ‘shameless’, ‘a bloody farce’, ‘a grim farce’, ‘a grim charade’, ‘gyrating indecisions’ and ‘political apologetics for doing nothing’—had the effect of ‘spreading pan-nationalism and genocide’, thereby allowing ‘brutal dictatorships [to] hide plans and programmes for mass terror against countries near and far’. Overall, Wohlstetter fulminated, it amounted to ‘the worst performance of the democracies A. Wohlstetter, ‘The Cold War Is Over and Over and . . . ’, Wall Street Journal, 1 October 1996.

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since World War Two’, even ‘exceed[ing] the nightmares of Vietnam.’29 Furthermore, Washington’s hand-wringing and hesitation were completely unnecessary since the United States had readily at hand the means required to settle the Balkan crisis forthwith—and, by extension, to dispatch any other ne’er-do-wells. Throughout history, war had been costly, hard and fraught with uncertainty. No more. At the end of a career spent poking holes in erstwhile simple solutions, Albert Wohlstetter had latched onto his own simple solution: war remade—indeed perfected— by advanced information technology.

Legacies By the time of Albert Wohlstetter’s death in 1997, precepts he had promoted for decades permeated the ranks of the American national-security establishment. Above all, his enthusiasm for precise, discriminate force as the basis of a new American way of war, imparting an expanded offensive potential to us defence policy, had come to enjoy wide circulation. Yet opening the ranks of the Wohlstetter School to include the riff-raff—the functionaries, elected and unelected, military and civilian, who translate theory into practice—came at a cost. Wohlstetter’s ideas enjoyed wide dissemination but in a corrupt or vulgar form. The term that popularizers coined to describe this new way of war, touted as a sure-fire recipe for security, was Revolution in Military Affairs. During its brief heyday, the rma gave birth to various offspring, almost all of them illegitimate. Two of these deserve attention here, since they played a significant role in creating the immediate climate from which the Bush Doctrine emerged. Both were products of the Clinton era. The first was ‘full-spectrum dominance’, a concept unveiled in Joint Vision 2010, a Pentagon document drafted in the mid-1990s. Joint Vision 2010 stands in relation to the rma as Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree stands in relation to globalization: it is an infomercial—marketing disguised as elucidation. To read jv 2010 is to learn how ‘dominant battlespace awareness’ will enable us commanders to ‘sense dangers sooner’ and ‘make better decisions more rapidly’, while employing weapons possessing ‘an order of 29 A. Wohlstetter, ‘Genocide by Embargo’, wsj, 9 May 1994; ‘Creating a Greater Serbia’, New Republic, 1 August 1994, p. 22; ‘Relentless Diplomacy and Mass Murder’, wsj, 5 September 1995; ‘Why We’re In It—Still’, wsj, 1 July 1993; ‘Chirac’s Challenge on Bosnia’, wsj, 20 July 1995; ‘Inferior un or Superior Coalition Force?’ wsj, 3 May 1995; ‘The Cold War Is Over’; ‘The Balkan Quagmire: The Way Out’, wsj, 2 July 1993.

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magnitude improvement in lethality’, all of this making us forces ‘persuasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict’.30 Full-spectrum dominance was not some wild notion concocted by a technology-besotted general staff. It bore the imprimatur of official policy and won the full approval of senior civilian leaders. ‘The information revolution’, a confident Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared in 1997, ‘is creating a revolution in military affairs that will fundamentally change the way us forces fight. We must exploit these and other technologies to dominate in battle. Our template for seizing on these technologies and ensuring military dominance is Joint Vision 2010.’ The rma, wrote Secretary Cohen, was providing us forces with ‘superior battle­space awareness, permitting them to dramatically reduce the fog of war’.31 Or as the 1999 edition of the Clinton administration’s national security strategy put it, ‘Exploiting the revolution in military affairs is fundamental if us forces are to retain their dominance in an uncertain world.’ Leveraging the rma’s ‘technological, doctrinal, operational and organizational innovations’ promised to ‘give us forces greater capabilities and flexibility’.32 Implicit in all of these references to dominance was an assumption about risk, that perennial bugaboo of the Wohlstetter School: the application of information technology to war was drastically curtailing it. As technology produced clarity, barriers to action were falling away; available options were increasing. To what use would these dominant capabilities be put? Here we come to the rma’s second bastard child, captured in a single seemingly innocuous word: ‘shaping’. Put simply, the rma created expectations of sculpting the international order to suit American preferences. ‘Shape, respond, prepare’: this was the slogan devised by the Clinton White House to describe the essence of post-Cold War us strategy. By limiting the actionable options available to would-be adversaries, American military pre-eminence would leave them with little alternative except to conform to Washington’s wishes. If nothing else, ‘shaping’ promised institutional relevance. In 1998, with major land wars nowhere to be seen, the us military was climbing aboard the bandwagon. ‘In support of our National Security Strategy’, the Secretary of the Army wrote in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010. William S. Cohen, ‘Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review’, Joint Forces Quarterly, Summer 1997, pp. 9, 11. 32 White House, A National Security Strategy for a New Century, December 1999, p. 21. 30 31

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his annual report, ‘America’s Army shapes the international environment in ways favourable for our nation. By promoting democracy and stability around the world, the Army reduces threats the nation could face in the next century.’33 This concept found favour even among neoconservatives, who other­ wise disdained Clinton’s approach to policy. In its founding statement of principles, the soon-to-be-famous Project for a New American Century put it this way: ‘The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.’34 Nor were civilians alone susceptible to these expectations. Senior military officers quickly bought in. ‘“Shaping” means creating a security setting such that it is unnecessary to fight to protect one’s interests’, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained approvingly in a 1997 address at Harvard. ‘We shape the strategic environment’, wrote General John Shalikashvili, another jcs chairman, ‘with forward presence, combined exercises, security assistance, and a host of other programmes’, thereby helping to ‘defuse potential conflict’.35 Just as any cheap knock-off pays tribute to the original, Washington’s enthusiasm for full-spectrum dominance and ‘shaping’ in the interval between the Cold War and the War on Terror represented a sort of unacknowledged—perhaps even unconscious— homage to the Wohlstetter School during the Clinton era. Shaping offered a soft-power approach to anticipatory action specifically intended to reduce risk. If implying the exercise of quasi-imperial prerogatives, it also promised to avoid, or at least minimize, the unseemliness of bombs and bloodshed. After all, given the existence of full-spectrum dominance, resistance to Washington’s dictates and desires would qualify as foolhardy in the extreme. Yet during the 1990s us efforts to ‘shape’ the Middle East yielded results other than those intended. Rather than reducing risk, forward presence, combined exercises, security assistance and the related programmes touted by General Shalikashvili enflamed anti-Americanism and played into the hands of those intent on waging violent jihad against 33 ‘Report of the Secretary of the Army’, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, Department of Defense 1998. 34 Project for a New American Century, ‘Statement of Principles’, 3 June 1997. 35 ‘A Word from the Chairman’, Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1997, p. 4.

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the United States. A series of attacks on us forces and installations, targeting the us barracks at Khobar Towers in 1996, us embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the destroyer uss Cole in 2000, told the tale. Even before 9/11, the changing of the guard in Washington had brought to power men fully imbued with the tenets of the Wohlstetter School and persuaded that the Clinton approach to shaping had been too tentative and diffident. For Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz the events of September 11, showing that the United States was as vulnerable to surprise as it had been back in December 1941, elicited not second thoughts but a determination to up the ante.36 The exercise of imperial prerogatives was going to entail bombs and bloodshed after all—precise, discriminate force actually employed, rather than merely held in reserve; Washington seizing opportunities to eradicate danger, rather than merely trying to manage it, and surprising others, rather than passively waiting to be surprised. In one form or another, these ideas had been circulating for decades. George W. Bush now invested them with the force of policy. The sorry tale of all that subsequently ensued need not be retold here. Bush and his advisers wasted little time in identifying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the venue in which to give America’s new doctrine of preventive war a trial run. Those making the case for war did so by resurrecting old chestnuts lifted from the Wohlstetter tradition. The nation was once again in deepest peril, Saddam posing a threat that was both global and existential. Contemplating America’s plight, the President and members of his inner circle assessed ‘the risk of action’ to be ‘smaller than the risk of inaction’, Wolfowitz explained.37 Benefiting from the close supervision of Donald Rumsfeld, planning for the invasion of Iraq put a premium on the use of precision force. Here was an occasion to use American power discriminately and for worthy ends. The Iraq War began with high hopes of ‘shock and awe’, as journalists and some enthusiastic analysts called it, producing an easy victory. Here, Richard Perle declared, ‘was the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.’ Operation Iraqi 36 In explaining how the United States had been caught unawares on September 11, 2001, the 9/11 Commission made favourable allusions to Roberta Wohlstetter’s book on Pearl Harbor. Once again, past us policies escaped examination. 37 Paul Wolfowitz, ‘Remarks at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’, 2 December 2002.

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Freedom reflected ‘an implementation of his strategy and his vision.’38 In many respects, the war’s opening phases seemed to validate all that the Wohlstetter School as a whole stood for. Yet only briefly: the real Iraq War—the conflict that began when Baghdad fell—left the Wohlstetter vision in tatters. An admirer once described Albert Wohlstetter as ‘the tailor who sought to clothe the emperor’.39 In a case of history mimicking fable, the raiment adorning the Emperor Bush turned out to be a figment of imagination. Still, there remained this: the prior assurances of Kennedy and Reagan notwithstanding, starting wars now formed the very cornerstone of us policy.

38 Quoted in Swidey, ‘The Mind of the Administration’, Boston Globe, 18 May 2003; Perle dedicated his 2004 manifesto An End to Evil: How To Win the War on Terror ‘To the memory of my friend and mentor Albert Wohlstetter and the many dedicated officials and thinkers he encouraged and inspired.’ 39 Stephen Lukasik, ‘Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence’, Nuclear Heuristics, p. 514.

REVIEWS

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History Belknap: London and Cambridge, MA 2010, $27.95, hardback 352 pp, 978 0 674 04872 0

Robin Blackburn

RECLAIMING HUMAN RIGHTS The discourse of human rights has become hegemonic in recent decades and it is hardly surprising that a new field of scholarship has appeared, dedicated to exploring how this happened. The ‘history of human rights’ has now generated a vast literature, identifying pioneers and theorists, tracing influences and anatomizing legal practices. A central question here is to determine the relation between Enlightenment doctrines of the Rights of Man—or, indeed, earlier conceptions of human universalism, from the Stoics to the authors of the New Testament—and contemporary notions of human rights: continuity or rupture? A further problem is historical: how to explain the emergence and extraordinary predominance of human-rights discourse in the second half of the 20th century? Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia represents a trenchant intervention in these debates. Moyn stresses the very recent emergence of human-rights discourse, disputing attempts to root it in the early post-war world, let alone the 18th century. In his view, the contemporary historiography of human rights has been compromised by its ‘celebratory attitude’, a tendency to offer ‘uplifting back stories’ and to recast world history ‘as raw material for the progressive ascent of international human rights’. The quest for ancestors has resulted in a teleological approach such that any emancipatory movement in history is interpreted as an anticipation of, and step towards, the discourse of human rights, ‘much as church history famously treated Judaism as a proto-Christian movement simply confused about its true destiny’. For Moyn, the history of human

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It became commonplace to assume that, ever since their birth in a moment of post-Holocaust wisdom, human rights embedded themselves slowly but steadily in human consciousness in what amounted to a revolution of moral concern. In a euphoric mood, many people believed that secure moral guidance, born out of shock about the Holocaust and nearly incontestable in its premises, was on the verge of displacing interest and power as the foundation of international society.

Moyn shows, however, that though the 1948 un Declaration of Human Rights was undoubtedly an important document, it did not in itself enshrine the discourse as a hegemonic ideology: ‘In real history, human rights were peripheral to both wartime rhetoric and post-war reconstruction, not central to their outcome. Contrary to conventional assumptions, there was no widespread Holocaust consciousness in the post-war era, so human rights

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rights has been loth to acknowledge that the discourse is ‘only one appealing ideology among others’. The Last Utopia is particularly scathing about attempts to recruit the ‘Rights of Man’ proclaimed by American and French revolutionaries as precursors of human rights: the former were aimed at state construction, while the specifically modern discourse of ‘human rights’ is a critique of state repression—‘another conception altogether’. As Moyn puts it: ‘Of all the glaring confusions in the search for “precursors” of human rights, one must have pride of place. Far from being sources of appeal that transcended state and nation, the rights asserted in early-modern revolutions and championed thereafter were central to the construction of state and nation, and led nowhere beyond until very recently.’ It is anachronistic, he argues, to attribute modern notions of ‘human rights’ to anyone in the 18th century, even when we find the term—which is not that often. The more common expression was ‘rights of man’ or occasionally ‘rights of humanity’ (the latter notably occurs in the opening pages of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). In the case of the American Declaration of Independence, for example, the claim is for the right to self-determination of a whole people and not for individual rights, except in so far as the latter arose in the context of founding a new state. (This helps to explain both how slaveholders could appeal to ‘unalienable rights’ and why there were such modest anti-slavery results— and such blatant disregard for the native peoples—from the leaders of the Independence struggle.) Moyn also pours cold water on what might be called the Ignatieff School, which sees human rights as ‘an old ideal that finally came into its own as a response to the Holocaust’—‘the most universally repeated myth about their origins’. This is the view that has underwritten the ideological ascendancy of human rights since the 1990s:

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could not have been a response to it.’ Moyn argues that few directly cited the 1948 un Declaration in the subsequent couple of decades. Indeed the New York Times barely mentioned the term ‘human rights’. The un itself arose as a concert of great powers and a staunch defender of state sovereignty. The struggles of the anti-colonial and Third World liberation movements of the 1950s and 60s, he suggests, were for the ‘self-determination of peoples’ rather than for individual human rights, while the 68ers criticized the Soviet bloc in the name of a ‘better, purer’ communism. Campaigns for human rights were largely restricted to Christian efforts on behalf of co-religionists, especially in the Communist world—‘outmoded, wordy and hypocritical’. The Last Utopia makes a strong case for seeing 1977 as the ‘breakthrough year’ for human rights discourse. Ideologically, the doctrine served as a replacement for ‘those whose God had failed’, whether that of socialism or of Third World liberation in the era of the crisis of indebted post-colonial states. The evidence here is largely French: André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers and Bernard-Henri Lévi’s Barbarism with a Human Face both appeared in 1977. Organizationally, Amnesty International already offered a model of local chapters campaigning for individual victims of persecution by lighting candles and writing letters to governments to plead for their release. Amnesty’s founders came from a Christian humanitarian background and its first ‘prisoners of conscience’ were fellow-believers in the Communist bloc, but in the 1970s it began to take up the cases of torture victims in Latin America. It opened a Washington office in 1976 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. But for Moyn the crucial catalyst is Carter’s championing of human rights as the basis for a new, anti-détente us foreign policy in his 1977 Inaugural Address: ‘Our commitment to human rights must be absolute’. He demonstrates how the doctrine could unite both left and right wings of the Democratic Party, yoking Carter’s born-again moralism to a post-Watergate ethical renewal. Strategically, at the same time, it served to launch a new ideological offensive against the Soviet Union—internationally isolated by the success of the Nixon–Kissinger China policy—that presaged the start of what Fred Halliday would term the ‘Second Cold War’. Moyn argues that it was the discourse’s combined function as substitute utopia and superpower strategy that launched its hegemonic ascendancy. It is the utopian element that Moyn appears to object to most: ‘In and through their emergence as the last utopia, after predecessors and rivals collapsed . . . human rights were forced to take on the grand political mission of providing a global framework for the achievement of freedom, identity and prosperity.’ Moyn is wary of the increasingly ambitious agenda of rights. He believes that: ‘Instead of turning to history to monumentalize human rights by rooting them deep in the past it is much better to acknowledge how

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recent and contingent they really are.’ These reflections lead to a suggestion that human rights have lost their way. Moyn believes that there may still be time to get back on the right track: ‘it may not be too late to wonder whether the concept of human rights, and the movement around it, should restrict themselves to offering minimal constraints on representative politics, not a new form of maximal politics of their own.’ A more restricted role for human-rights interventions—confined simply to preventing catastrophes, perhaps—would make room for ‘the contest of genuinely political visions for the future’. The Last Utopia supplies a detailed, subtle and in many ways convincing account of the human-rights ‘surge’. Moyn’s case for a 1970s turningpoint is a strong one and occupies the best chapters in the book. He rightly warns that human-rights discourse can de-politicize and oversimplify. In this respect his criticisms echo a famous argument made by Marcel Gauchet’s 1980 essay, ‘Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’. Moyn’s previous work has focused on French intellectual history: he has written on Levinas’s ethics (Origins of the Other, 2005) and on Holocaust awareness in France, and is the English-language editor and translator of Pierre Rosanvallon’s Democracy Past and Future (2007). (Still in his thirties, Moyn currently teaches European intellectual history at Columbia.) French liberalism famously split over the function of human-rights discourse some decades ago, when a more sober faction—François Furet, Pierre Nora, Rosanvallon, Gauchet—distanced itself from the ultra-liberalism of BernardHenri Lévy and Daniel Lindenberg: not anti-state liberalism but a liberal state was required. To some extent The Last Utopia may be seen as reprising, for a post-Iraq era, moves made thirty years ago in Paris. Moyn would like to see ‘representative politics’ adopt radical measures aimed at overcoming the yawning abyss in life chances, since massive inequalities will not vanish at the waving of the wand of ‘human rights’. However, he does not give much idea as to what ‘politics’ might reasonably do to challenge global injustices and global dangers. There are important intellectual lacunae in Moyn’s account. He provides a brisk account of the treatment of human rights in international law, but has barely two lines on Myres McDougal, the militant Cold Warrior who was a towering figure in the field, and scarcely a mention of Hans Kelsen, universally acknowledged to be the global doyen of the discipline. More importantly, the large philosophical literature discussing the intellectual foundations of human rights is completely ignored. Bafflingly, Moyn offers no assessment of what Carter’s human-rights policy actually consisted of, confessing only that it may have been ‘selective’. Indeed: while Soviet dissidents were lauded, there was no question of calling the Shah, Suharto, Turkish generals or Saudi monarchs to account, and within short order the

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Carter Doctrine had dispatched the Rapid Deployment Force to the Persian Gulf. But perhaps the most glaring absence of all is any discussion of the history of the doctrine since the end of the Cold War or of its deployment, from Clinton and Blair onwards, as a fig-leaf for Western war-mongering in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’. This is a curious and damaging omission. During the 1990s, by any reckoning the West presided over a human-rights disaster in former Yugoslavia—notwithstanding the fact that it had an enormously strong hand to play, if its goal had been simply that of fostering democracy, safeguarding the rights of minorities and harmonizing the aspirations of the different republics and peoples of the Yugoslav federation. Despite its talk, the strategic goal of the Clinton White House was the expansion of nato and not ‘human rights’. If accepted as a partner, the Russian government was pathetically anxious to be of help, as I argued in these pages at the time. Determined to exploit Moscow’s weakness to the hilt, it treated the csce and the Treaty of Paris as mere scraps of paper. If the Russians had denied oil and munitions to the Serbian forces, and if funds had been available to the federal Yugoslav authorities, Milosevic could have been first halted and then removed by domestic opponents—as eventually happened, but only after hundreds of thousands of deaths and the ethnic cleansing of millions. There is, of course, room for argument over details but the key point is that the West, notwithstanding its clamour about human rights, did not seriously attempt the peaceful regulation of the Yugoslav break-up by means of the established treaty. Moyn’s iconoclastic challenge to pious myths in the early chapters is abandoned when he comes to the sorry latter-day adventures of ‘hrd’. But the abuse of human rights for great-power ends need not necessarily disqualify them as emancipatory tools. Here Moyn’s ‘minimal programme’ of preventing, say, physical harm, would leave unchecked the global forces making for huge inequality and a planet of slums—forces which stunt the lives of hundreds of millions of the ‘wretched of the earth’. A different sort of problem is raised by The Last Utopia’s hostility to precursors. Moyn cites Marc Bloch’s warning to historians about idolizing origins—believing that the trickle of melted snow must be the only source for the downstream flood of the mighty river, which may depend on new, unseen sources, joining the river where it swells. But his insistent denial of any and all antecedents is exaggerated and wrong. (As for Bloch, his own intense interest in Feudal Society in the waning of medieval slavery, and its bearing on later liberties, surely proves that he was far from proscribing all interest in antecedents.) The historical record simply does not bear out Moyn’s claim that 18th-century appeals to natural rights ‘led nowhere’. The process by which, for example, some abolitionists and slave rebels came to make such appeals was highly complex and contingent but no less momentous for that. Abolitionists drew

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on slave witness and a few reached out to slave rebels. Together they inspired social movements of great illocutionary power and momentous acts of slave emancipation. There were certainly close links between state formation and nationalism, on the one hand, and slave emancipation on the other. But if abolitionism was often aligned with state interests it also enjoyed some autonomy as a social movement. In Britain in the 1780s or 1830s, or the United States in the 1830s and after, or in France in the 1840s, radical abolitionism sought to challenge and change the state. In a famous phrase William Lloyd Garrison, the anti-slavery veteran, denounced the us Constitution as a ‘Pact with the Devil and Covenant with Hell’. The international scope of abolitionism also pointed to the emergence of new mentalities. We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression. The ‘golden rule’—do unto others as you would have them do to you—acquired new dimensions in the realm of print culture, autobiography as well as novels. The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves. The very modesty of Laurence Sterne’s ‘poor negro girl’ in Tristram Shandy, who brushes aside flies with a feather rather than kill them, takes the reader off guard. The Corporal asks ‘(doubtingly)’ if ‘the negro has a soul?’ to which Uncle Toby replies: ‘I am not much versed in things of that kind; but I suppose God would not leave him without one, any more than thee or me.—It would be putting one sadly ahead of another, quoth the Corporal’. The Corporal then asks whether a black wench is to be used worse than a white one? When Uncle Toby says he can see no reason why, the Corporal replies that she had ‘no one to stand up for her’. Uncle Toby responds: ‘Tis that very thing . . . that recommends her to protection— and her brethren with her’: ‘tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now—where it may be hereafter who knows.’ Moyn is right to criticize modern rights-centred accounts which encourage ‘church history’ and a search for ‘saints’, but these are not the only ways to plot influences and contrasts. It was not necessarily easy to control and segregate the talk of rights in the ‘Age of Revolution’. Those who went

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beyond the rhetoric of liberty to challenge racial enslavement, for example, could not help coming into conflict with states enriched by Atlantic commerce. Thus the first writer to issue an unequivocal denunciation of slavery was George Wallace in a chapter devoted to the question in his book A System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland in 1760. It is worth quoting as it clearly affirms an individual right. Wallace bluntly asserted that ‘men and their liberty are not in commercio’. He insisted: For these reasons every one of those unfortunate men who are pretended to be slaves, has a right to be declared free for he never lost his liberty, he could not lose it, his prince had no power to dispose of him. Of course the sale was ipso jure void. This right he carries around with him and is entitled everywhere to get it declared. As soon, therefore, as he comes into a country where the judges are not forgetful of their own humanity it is their duty to remember that he is a man and to declare him free.

I suggest that this is the first clear statement that Atlantic slavery was incompatible with what could surely be described as a human right, or of what Ted Honderich calls the ‘principle of humanity’. Wallace explicitly elaborates that ‘it is intolerable to abuse mankind that our pockets may be filled with money or our mouths with delicates.’ He declares private property to be ‘the bane of human felicity’. His chapter on slavery achieved wide currency. It was reprinted in several editions in a collection published by the Quaker and abolitionist pioneer Anthony Benezet. It also served as the basis for the entry under slavery in the French Encyclopédie. The abolitionist case also required an ability to foster a sense of responsibility amongst its hearers and readers for actions taking place out of sight, indeed thousands of miles away. Then as now complex commercial relations obscured such responsibility, or distributed it so broadly as to counsel resignation and passivity. Abolitionists had to make a case that such an apparently innocent and peaceful act as shopping was laden with moral implications and linked to the violence of the slave traffic, and the remorseless driving of the slave gangs. These lines—by the seventeen-year-old Mary Birkett—are from a 1792 poem ‘addressed to her own sex’, which asks ‘Shall for us the sable sufferers sigh? / Say, shall for us so many victims die?’: Say not that small’s the sphere in which we move, And our attempts would vain and fruitless prove; Not so—we hold a most important share, In all the evils—all the wrong they bear.

Moyn denies that the Haitian revolutionaries were animated by a concern for ‘human rights’, and tries to buttress his claim by drawing on what he takes to be the more hard-headed approach of C. L. R. James in his Black Jacobins:

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James was certainly scathing about those who prated about the ‘rights of man’ while upholding a vicious slave system. But he was neither a cynic nor a reductionist, wedded to ‘the true economic motor of history’. James acknowledged the power of revolutionary ideals and noted that Toussaint invoked ‘liberty and equality’ in his declaration of 29 August, 1793. Likewise James stressed the huge importance of the moral factor. ‘It was the colonial question which demoralized the Constituent Assembly’, James insisted. ‘To avoid giving the Mulattoes the Rights of Man they had to descend to low dodges and crooked negotiations that destroyed their revolutionary integrity.’ We should recall that Toussaint L’Ouverture won his most important victories over Britain, Spain and the French royalists as a Republican general. Charting the changes in slave mentalities at a time of revolution is very difficult. We have to dig beneath ready-made notions—whether of purely heroic rebels or of implacable caste hatreds—to bring to light the forging of new identities and new ideals. The Haitian Revolution appealed powerfully to the Romantic imagination, but understanding it is not helped by the seductive and romantic notion that slaves were bound to rebel, bound to champion a general emancipation and bound to triumph (or to fail). It is important to note that the slave community had a reality, notwithstanding the hierarchy and heterogeneity within it between Creoles and the Africanborn, or between different African nations. The racialized structure of exploitation fostered a countervailing solidarity, since only those of African descent were enslaved. The Kréyole saying tou moun se moun, ‘everyone is a person’, perhaps echoed the African notion of ubuntu ngumuntu ngabantu— a person is a person through other people. This was a connection reiterated by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected President of Haiti overthrown by a Franco-American coup in 2004, in his introduction to a new collection of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s writings, The Haitian Revolution. I readily grant that modern human-rights doctrines belong to a different world to that inhabited by the revolutionaries of the 1790s; but putting it the other way round, considering anti-slavery’s impact on modern political culture, and the diverse attempts to appropriate the abolitionist legacy, is another matter. Claims for rights were often distorted. But they were also sometimes radicalized in the course of the struggle and as a consequence of their bid to capture the popular wave. Not infrequently the claimants themselves came up with improved formulations and more precise and relevant demands.

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James did not think of presenting Toussaint L’Ouverture and his confederates as human-rights activists before their time. A Trotskyist, James’ view of droits de l’homme, instead, seems to have been as the ‘wordy’ promises of eloquent ‘phrase makers’ who, driven by the true economic motor of history to ‘perorate’, were in the end only willing to give up the aristocracy of the skin at the point of the gun.

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In the 1860s, African American congresses in New York, South Carolina and Louisiana issued ‘Declarations of Rights and Wrongs’ and demands for ‘public rights’—equal access to public transportation and accommodation. There is a living tradition here that cannot be artificially arrested at some privileged moment. The problem with Moyn’s re-reading is that it overstresses one important conjuncture—the 1970s—and plays down any sense of a longer history of rights, both before and after his magic moment. Thus Moyn argues that few directly cited the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the twenty years that followed its adoption by the un; during this period, the New York Times barely mentioned ‘human rights’. Yet the Non-Aligned Movement formally adopted the Universal Declaration at its meetings in Bandung and Lusaka. The Declaration had far-reaching significance because it defined the meaning of the defeat of fascism and, by incorporating significant social and economic rights, summarized the results of nearly a century of labour struggles. Anti-racist movements in South Africa and the United States also rightly claimed its mantle. The framers of the un Declaration in the late 1940s were certainly aware of the terrible carnage that had wiped out some seventy million human beings; they were offering a response to the widespread aspiration for a world without the terrible ravages that had just been experienced, and without the distempers and depression that had produced the War in the first place. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ included ‘freedom from fear’, one with a particular relevance to African-Americans living in the Southern Jim Crow regime. Many of the social rights in the 1948 Declaration echoed the Soviet Constitution of 1936—drafted, it should be noted, by Bukharin, not Stalin, as a widespread myth has it. The Declaration reflected, rather than created, the longing for an attainable utopia. One of the impulses that led to its drafting was an ‘Appeal to the World’ from the us National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (naacp), written in part by W. E. B. DuBois, and which—as Moyn is obliged to note— presented ‘African American subordination as a human-rights violation’. (Carol Anderson’s outstanding book, Eyes Off the Prize, helps to fill out this narrative.) The ‘Appeal to the World’ was formally submitted to the un in October 1947; Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the naacp, was apparently alarmed at the possibility that the Soviet delegation would use it against the us government. DuBois saw the anti-colonial agenda and the demand for AfricanAmerican equality and freedom as allied and mutually supportive: African-Americans would step up their support for decolonization and the appearance of new African and Asian states would—in the climate of incipient Cold War rivalry—increase pressure on the us government to guarantee African-Americans the enjoyment of rights they had been so long denied.

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Though DuBois himself would be driven out of the naacp by a right-wing campaign, the implicit alignment between movements to end white rule in Africa and movements to end Jim Crow in the us was clear enough. The ‘human rights’ idea was taken up in different ways by the South African Freedom Charter, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights. Moyn apparently does not regard the anti-racialist component of much anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism as a dimension of the ‘human rights’ package—wrongly, in my view. The struggle against apartheid South Africa was an icon of the anti-imperialist movement and surely had an absolute claim to the banner of human rights. Moyn’s scanty coverage—barely a paragraph—of the internationalist left in the 1960s and 70s is equally cloth-eared. He writes of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunals, ‘these versions of internationalism were a world away from the human-rights movement soon to form’. Quite why the Russell Tribunal could be denied any concern with human rights is not clear. One of its members, Jean-Paul Sartre, declared in this journal that its deliberations were animated by ‘a certain idea of human life’. Its initial aim was to apply the Nuremberg and Geneva norms to us conduct in Indochina and to publicize the associated crimes against humanity. At the initiative of some Latin American leftists, a further Russell Tribunal was established in the 1970s to investigate and document violations by dictatorships in Latin America, with its death squads and disappeared ones. While many involved in the Tribunal had anti-capitalist commitments not shared by many later human-rights movements, their abhorrence of arbitrary state repression, wherever found, was not ‘a world away’. For Moyn, the 1960s and early 70s were an age prior to human rights, in which ‘the romance of third-world revolution and, where necessary, guerrilla warfare provides the starkest counterpoint to later human-rights activism’. In fact, that period witnessed a proliferation of movements that helped dramatically to widen notions of ‘human rights’: women’s liberation, gay liberation, the hopes for ‘socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia, the overthrow of dictatorship in Portugal and Spain, the European surge of trade-union mobilizations. Régis Debray’s pamphlet Revolution in the Revolution, to which Moyn refers, was not ‘breathlessly consumed’ but critically debated. A striking passage in one of Debray’s essays insisted that the death of an enemy soldier was no less a human tragedy than the loss of a revolutionary fighter, for ‘the tragedy is that we do not kill objects, numbers, abstract or interchangeable instruments, but, precisely, on both sides, irreplaceable individuals, essentially innocent, unique for those who have loved them, bred, esteemed them’—‘It is not individuals who are placed face-to-face in the battles, but class interests and ideas. Yet those who fall in

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them, those who die, are men, are persons. We cannot avoid this contradiction, escape this pain.’ The Latin American leftist guerrillas were suppressed with great brutality in one country after another from the mid-60s onwards. From Kennedy to Carter, Washington turned a blind eye to death squads, or even connived at their activities. Within the guerrilla movements an internal critique emerged, to which Debray contributed with his 1974 Critique des armes. The memoir of an indigenous Guatemalan woman, I, Rigoberta Menchu, edited by Elizabeth Burgos Debray, exposed the horrendous slaughter and showed that the defence of human rights was a critical terrain if the leftist movements were to regain the initiative against a string of Latin American dictatorships. The book helped to inspire a momentous reorientation and resurgence. This would not be news to Moyn, who has a disconcerting tendency to modify his argument as it proceeds. After consigning the Russell Tribunal’s Southern Cone war hearings, with their crucial Latin American participation, to ‘another world’ from that of human rights, he calmly announces: ‘It was the decision of a sector of the Latin American left to resist the regional repression in human-rights terms that helped to make the fortune of the concept in that region and beyond.’ I have already noted Moyn’s evasion of the problem posed by the latter-day militarist and imperialist instrumentalization of human-rights discourse by Washington and its allies—those who would impose freedom and democracy from 30,000 feet. Yet for an internationalist left, this remains a central question. I would argue that human rights cannot be written off just for that reason. Just as the ‘rights of man’ or abolitionist demands were sometimes misappropriated in past centuries, so ‘humanitarianism’ has all too often been adopted as cover for post-Cold War militarism in recent times. It is necessary to disentangle the different uses of human rights—and to register that cynical attempts to exploit its language are likely to backfire. If the discourse of human rights had never been more than diplomatic jargon, it would not have become hegemonic; and if it does end up being no more than such a jargon, it will have lost its hegemony. In practice, the language of rights is used to attract and maintain a following. Those who wage imperial wars in its name are adopting a risky strategy that can blow up in their faces. Equally obviously, movements of protest against torture, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment are desperately needed in many parts of the world. Those attacking the us or British governments for ‘rendition’ and the torture of suspects, or those claiming labour rights in China, find succour in human-rights language even if they would also need to reach beyond it. We need to deepen our notion of human injury so that it can register, for example, the myriad of tiny, innocent decisions or actions which reproduce global deprivation and environmental degradation. We need to

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recall the human-rights implications of Western governments’ brisk sales of devastating weaponry to repressive regimes. What counts as a human right is not completely malleable but must prove itself, not just at one time and in one place but across a range of different contexts; this being an important reason why the evidence of history matters. Social and economic demands with a progressive character—the right to work, pensions, basic income, minimum wages, shorter working week, universal heathcare etc.—can sometimes be advanced using the language of rights, even if over the past twenty years ‘hrd’ has more often been tethered to the liberalimperial masthead. Conditions could change, and efforts to bring out the anti-militarist and socially egalitarian potential of respect for human rights, without quote marks or abbreviation, deserve support. Marxism has sometimes been seen as exalting the workers and toilers, and thus rejecting any humanist claptrap. But Marx’s adherence to the necessity of class struggle did not prevent him from arguing that capitalism was frustrating the full development of humanity’s ‘species being’. Without essentializing or idealizing the ‘human’, he and Engels concluded the Communist Manifesto by declaring that their goal was an association in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. This lucid and innovatory goal evokes an as yet unattained standard. The Manifesto insisted that it was necessary first to win ‘the battle for democracy’, rights of organization, public debate and representation; points reiterated in the International Workingmen’s Association addresses, as drafted by Marx. Pointing this out does not mean that Marx always gave as much attention as ideally he should have to the specific situation of women, farmers, shantytown dwellers, the wageless or the low waged ‘precariat’. But it does suggest that there is conceptual room within the Marxist schema of social relations for categories that refer to the human species as a whole. The requirements of human flourishing have certain material and ideal components and these furnish an anthropological basis for the notion of ‘human rights’ and popular recognition of this fact helps to give rights claims their traction. What does, or might, constitute the ‘truly human’ is not already given but is a work in progress and will be shaped by the sort of dialogue that led to slave emancipation and the post-emancipation struggles. Thus feminists have felt the need to insist that womens’ rights are human rights. And in some situations even the denunciations of human rights may contribute to a clearer view of human progress. The legacy of past struggles remains itself a resource in combating new oppressions and destructions. It should not be approached in the spirit of ‘church history’ nor with the goal of monumentalizing the past. And the ambition must be neither maximalist nor minimalist but rather adequate to the scope of the problems humanity faces. ‘Human rights’ can serve

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as a valuable watchword and measure. But because inequality and injustice are structural, constituted by multiple intersecting planes of capitalist accumulation and realization, more needs to be said—especially in relation to financial and corporate power and how these might be curbed and socialized. The plight of billions can be represented as a lack of effective rights, but it is the ‘property question’—the fact that the world is owned by a tiny elite of expropriators—that is constitutive of that plight. The slogan of rights takes us some way along the path; but it alone cannot pose the property question relevant to the 21st century.

Peter Osborne

GUATTAREUZE? Philosophy invites and repels biography in equal measure. On the one hand, it is identified with its most famous names in a way that would seem anachronistic in other disciplines; on the other, the lives of philosophers most often seem beside the point when it comes to understanding the individ­uality of their thought. If social histories of philosophy tend towards over-generalizing abstractions, personalizing ones are in danger of failing to illuminate the work at all. Hence the somewhat perverse character of the fascination with the lives of philosophers: the banality of the everyday acquires an added poignancy when the narrated life so consistently disappoints the search for the secret of the thought. This applies as much to ‘engaged’ philosophers (Heidegger, for example—a subject of intense biographical scrutiny, for obvious political reasons) as it does to less engaged ones (Kant, whose life’s charm resides, famously, in its metronomic uneventfulness). It is hard, though, to dispel the intuition that there is some important connection between the life and the thought. Nonetheless, attempts to use biography reflexively, in a philosophical rather than a fictional manner, are hard to find. Apart from Wilhelm Dilthey’s turn-of-the-century experiments in philosophical biography, seeking out the ‘spiritual core’ of a life—The Life of Schleiermacher, The Story of the Young Hegel—which shaped Heidegger’s early ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, Sartre’s mid-twentieth-century tussles with existential biography (Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert) are more or less all we have. Of late, the thirst for philosophical biography has had to make do with the cultural history of ideas: a life reduced to a chronological succession of events, suitably contextualized, interspersed with summaries of texts and quotations from correspondence

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François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives Columbia University Press: New York 2010, £26, hardback 651 pp, 978 0 231 14560 2

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and interviews. The contextualization is necessarily collective, of course, and it is there that the fabric of the story is woven. Philosophers who were active on broader intellectual, cultural and political scenes obviously make better conventional biographical subjects than the recluses that popular imagination prefers them to be. The better-known French philosophers since the 1960s fit the bill well. And in the wake of Yann Moulier-Boutang’s life of Althusser (published in the same year, 1992, as his subject’s tortured and idiosyncratic autobiography), several successful instances of the genre appeared: notably, Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought (1993; translation 1997) and the two Foucault biographies by James Miller and David Macey (The Passion of Michel Foucault and The Lives of Michel Foucault, respectively, both also 1993). Each displays a level of theoretical sophistication in the presentation of philosophical ideas one would be unlikely to find in the biography of an Anglophone thinker. Recently, the more collective standpoints of intellectual context and reception have come to the fore, in Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (2005; translation 2008) and François Cusset’s French Theory (the English expression is the title of the French edition): How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2003; translation 2008). François Dosse—author of the new ‘crossed’ biography of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his sometime co-author, the psychiatrist and activist Félix Guattari—was a pioneer in this field with his two-volume The History of Structuralism (1991–92; translation 1997). Dosse wrote about structuralism some time after its decline. (In the French edition, the second volume, ‘1967– the present’, is subtitled Le chant du cygne, the swansong— punning on the first volume’s Le champ du signe, the field of the sign, as if the fall was predestined.) And he wrote about it with a knowing retrospection, facility and eye to the market that understandably irritated some of those involved in the project. (In a 1995 paper, Étienne Balibar dubbed the book, ‘truth be told, extremely mediocre’.) Nonetheless, its combination of journalistic method (interview), narrative (racy) and prose (limpid) was highly effective as a means for the wider transmission of sometimes opaque debates—the ‘hyper-formalism’ of the journal Cahiers pour l’analyse, in particular. In taking on Deleuze and Guattari, however, at what is probably the peak of their influence internationally, Dosse is entering a different arena. One British academic publisher (Edinburgh University Press) alone lists 33 books with ‘Deleuze’ in the title in its Philosophy catalogue for 2011. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives proceeds unencumbered by any problems of reflexivity posed by writing the overlapping life-stories of two thinkers whose work is so closely associated with the post-structuralist

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dissolution of the concept of the ‘subject’, and who came increasingly to focus on the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘subjectivation’ (the process of production of a subject), respectively. This was no doubt a commercial decision, but it is no less unsatisfactory for that. Dosse is not philosophically unknowing—as the high level of the précis of Deleuze’s major works demonstrates. The decision is, however, indicative of the industrial manner in which he presents the results of some impressively bulging filing systems, containing a huge amount of interview material, a significant amount of it borrowed. (The 49 interviews conducted by the documentary-maker Virginie Linhart for her aborted biography of Guattari contain the core of what is new in the book.) Material is ‘processed’ in a manner more impressive for its work ethic than its literary effect; although this is itself a literary effect of sorts: the simple reproduction of a genre, suspended between journalism and history. This operation has not been improved by an uneven, occasionally comically awkward translation into English, and a chaotically incompetent job of copy-editing. At what should surely be a narrative climax in the text—the death of Deleuze—we are informed in a truly Pythonesque manner that ‘he had just defenestrated himself’; where the French simply reads ‘il vient de se jeter par la fenêtre’. In four of the chapters (2, 6, 7, 13), the endnote references lose their moorings in the main text. Nonetheless, there is sufficient material here, of a sufficiently interesting kind, sufficiently competently processed, to make the book a significant point of reference. It mainly concerns Guattari. If Intersecting Lives has an effect upon the field, it is likely to be in its contribution to the emergent, second stage in the reception of Deleuze-and-Guattari: Guattari studies, or what the philosopher Éric Alliez has called ‘the Guattari–Deleuze effect’. Following a brief overview of the relations between its protagonists, the book is organized into three parts: ‘Parallel Biographies’, ‘Intersecting Lives’ and ‘Surplices’. Part I takes us swiftly through the two lives to the point at which they first meet, in June 1969. Part II covers the main period of their friendship and joint authorship, 1969–80, up to the publication of A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Surplices’ narrates the growing separation, the late works, the final years and the posthumous explosion in its subjects’ international academic reception, up until 2007, the year Dosse’s book was published in French. The material on Guattari culled from Linhart’s interviews is by some distance the most interesting. This is not only because his work, in its independence from the joint authorship, is less well known and still largely unexplored, but because, as an activist in a range of struggles, Guattari was so much more connected to the events of his day than was Deleuze. Indeed, it is hard to avoid reading Deleuze’s account of ‘the mystery of a philosopher’s life’, in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970; trans. 1980), as anything other than an autobiographical aspiration.

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Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher’s life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues— humility, poverty, chastity—and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact. He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life, but rather the ‘effects’ of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher.

However one judges the shifting balance in the influence upon Deleuze of particular philosophers (Bergson and Spinoza, in particular), in his work with Guattari, there is no doubt of the abiding centrality of Nietzsche to his thought. From his 1962 book, Nietzsche and Philosophy—which prefigured and in part precipitated the ‘Nietzschean turn’ in French thought in the late 1960s—this was the thinker to whom Deleuze stayed closest. Guattari, one might say, gave him the connection to his times that he needed in order to put his Nietzschean asceticism to full ‘not very ascetic’ effect. For his part, Deleuze gave Guattari the opportunity to participate, fleetingly, in the mysterious—and, for Guattari, by no means unequivocally desirable— life of philosophy. Born five years apart, Deleuze in 1925 and Guattari in 1930, the pair were the precocious, reactive products of different kinds of conservative petit-bourgeois family. Deleuze’s father, Louis, was an engineer and sympathizer of the far-right league of First World War veterans, the Croix-de-Feu. He had his own small company in Paris (with a single employee), which was forced to close during the 1930s, at which point he went to work for another company making airplane fuselages. Dosse presents Gilles’s family life as lived in the shadow of his elder brother Georges, upon whom his parents doted. Studying at Saint-Cyr military school at the outbreak of the War, Georges joined the Resistance, was captured and died en route to a concentration camp. Georges was the hero; Gilles, parked for the early years of the War in a boarding school in Brittany, ‘the second child, the mediocre son’. Subsequently, ‘Deleuze tirelessly denounced family ties’ and found ‘the mere mention of his childhood unbearable’. In his senior lycée years, back in Paris after the Armistice, Deleuze’s intellectual brilliance was already recognized, and by 1943–44, he was attending elite salons frequented by Bataille, Caillois, Hyppolite, Klossowski, Kojève and Sartre. Deleuze studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and taught at a string of lycées—Amiens, Orléans, Louis-le-Grand in Paris—before returning to the Sorbonne as a lecturer in 1957. He moved to the Université de Lyon in 1964. Guattari—né Pierre-Félix, or ‘little Pierre’ as he was called at home— was the third of three brothers in a family that moved around from Paris to Monte Carlo, Epinay, the Orne, the Oise and back to Paris: first, in search of sea air (Félix’s father had been gassed in the Great War) and the casino

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(he loved to gamble), then in pursuit of a succession of small businesses, each of which failed in turn. Pierre-Félix was born among the angora rabbits of Villeneuve-les-Sablons in Picardy. But the ‘modernization of the textile industry quickly led to the collapse of the traditional angora industry, and the Guattaris were forced to eat their rabbits.’ Félix’s father was Italian, from Bologna; a member of Croix-de-Feu in the 1930s and a Gaullist during the war. His mother—to whom he later confessed to feeling constantly ‘both too close and too far’—was Corsican. Guattari’s precociousness was not academic, but political. At the time of the Liberation, barely fourteen, he started attending Communist Party meetings, and soon became a member, ‘even though temperamentally he was more of an anarchist’. He found a life outside the family—and ‘discovered girls’—in the network of post-war youth hostels that were set up to organize student vacations. He also reconnected there with Fernand Oury, who was briefly his school teacher during the War, and had been put in charge of recreational activities in the Student Hostel organization. It was Fernand’s brother, Jean, the psychiatrist—whom Guattari first met at this time—who in 1953 founded the clinic at La Borde, in the Loire Valley, with which Guattari would become most notoriously associated; he would move there in 1955. It was also Jean Oury who persuaded Guattari to read Lacan, as early as 1951, when he was suffering from the stultifying boredom of his studies in pharmacology. Guattari’s life is primarily a history of relationships, groups and events. Deleuze’s life is narrated as a series of texts, rendered by Dosse in conventional academic summaries. And while the lives are lines, metaphorically speaking, the intersections are points, or at best small areas, altogether more difficult simply to narrate. Dosse deals with the problem, not reflectively, but by overriding the biographical details he provides with stock narrative tropes. The pattern is established at the outset, in a beginning that reviewers have felt compelled simply to repeat (generally, unacknowledged) as if it contained the truth of everything to follow. It goes like this: Deleuze, the ‘recognized philosopher’, and Guattari, the ‘militant psychoanalyst’ and ‘social scientist’, inhabited such ‘very different worlds’ that ‘there was little chance that they would ever meet’. Their ‘unlikely encounter’ thus had something special about it, some magic connected to its contingency, out of which an ‘epic consequence’ was born. This is the theory of Deleuze– Guattari the surrealist object, akin to Lautréamont’s famous ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an autopsy table’ (the autopsy table of structuralism, perhaps). Except that the meeting—which took place in June 1969—was not a chance one at all, but was brokered by a mutual friend, Jean-Pierre Muyard, who happened—wonder of wonders— to cross these two supposedly separate ‘worlds’. Furthermore, we learn on turning the page, this allegedly most unlikely of encounters had in fact been

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prepared by an exchange of letters between its two protagonists, over several months, initiated by Guattari sending Deleuze some of his articles on Lacan; having been inspired by Deleuze’s 1969 book, The Logic of Sense. Deleuze responded and the exchange continued, until by May Deleuze could write: ‘I also feel that we’ve become friends before meeting one another.’ So much for the chance encounter. This disparity between the imposition of a stock narrative and the content of the narrated material—the latter directly contradicting the former—is a relatively frequent occurrence. One effect is to scramble the chronology of Dosse’s account, in order for it to appear in thematically self-contained packages, making it at times extremely hard to reconstruct the sequence of events. It is as if he has an established story to tell and a pile of oftenfascinating information to process and impart, and these are treated as two quite separate tasks, to be performed without mediation. Indeed, it is one of Dosse’s skills to more or less disappear from his text, as if he were a transparent medium for the expression of documentation and interview materials. This has some advantages—those of a modernist impersonalism—but it is ultimately a dissembling device. For not only does the opening two-worlds theory of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis in Paris in the 1960s fall down flat, empirically, on page two, but it is the intrinsic entanglement of philosophy and psychoanalysis, and its political implications, that the Deleuze–Guattari joint authorship was all about; as demonstrated by the material Dosse himself presents. Most people familiar only with the popular image of Guattari as a ‘wild’ (anti-)psychiatrist of the liberated positivity of desire will be surprised to learn that prior to his encounter with Deleuze, Guattari had not merely read but was ‘a disciple’ of Lacan; indeed, he was the first person without medical training to be permitted to take Lacan’s seminar, from late 1954 onwards. Dosse relates the intriguing fact that Guattari was a disciple of Lacan as one among myriad others; but almost everything revolves around it. Lacan is the hinge of this story. One might even go so far as to say that Lacan is the ‘and’ in ‘Deleuze and Guattari’. And as readers of Deleuze will know, the ‘and’ was an important philosophical concept for Deleuze at precisely the moment of his first encounter with Guattari, in The Logic of Sense, a book organized not into ‘chapters’ but ‘series’. At once conjunctive and a mark of disjunction (a ‘conjunctive disjunction’), the ‘and’ provides the syntax of the series. It is in the meta-serial Sixth Series, ‘On Serialization’, that Lacan’s work first crops up in The Logic of Sense. We find there a compelling account, first, of the idea that ‘the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series’, and second, of the idea that such series communicate by means of an entity that is always ‘in excess’ in relation to one series, and ‘lacking’ in relation to the other. ‘In fact’, Deleuze writes, ‘there is no stranger element

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Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones . . . Structuralism is not only inseparable from the works that it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the products that it interprets. Whether this practice is therapeutic or political, it designates a point of permanent revolution, or of permanent transfer.

It was precisely this structuralist subject, and its relations to the permanent transfers of a ‘therapeutic’ and ‘political’ structuralist practice, that Deleuze needed Guattari to help him explore. The concept of the unconscious as a

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than this double-headed thing, with two unequal or uneven halves’, which makes series possible. (This is something like a structural, ahistorical and anti-dialectical version of Adorno’s famous ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which they do not add up’.) Deleuze’s model for this analysis of the double-headed thing is Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, in which the missing letter, hidden in plain sight, functions as the communicating element between the two episodes in the story. (Deleuze is here reprising an analysis first put forward in the ‘Serial’ section of his 1967 essay ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, itself not published until 1972.) Deleuze-and-Guattari, we might say, is just such a strange double-headed thing: both lacking and in excess on every occasion, in convergent series, in uneven measure. Dosse cites the remarks Deleuze makes about the ‘and’ in his 1976 Cahiers du Cinéma article on Godard’s Six Times Two at both the outset and the end of Intersecting Lives, but he fails to make the connection to Lacan. The role of Lacan in the Sixth Series of The Logic of Sense is symptomatic not only of the passing importance of Lacan to Deleuze, but of the philosophical rationale of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s mutual interest in his thought: its position at the limits of structuralism. Dosse rightly presents Guattari as a motivating force behind the movement of Deleuze’s thought away from the ambivalent structuralism of The Logic of Sense. ‘Guattari’s idea of a machine replaced the idea of structure and provided Deleuze with a possible way out of structuralism, something that he has already explored in The Logic of Sense.’ Indeed, for Dosse, this is the crux of Guattari’s importance to Deleuze. However, he neglects the significance of Deleuze’s 1967 essay, in establishing the conditions for Deleuze’s reception of Guattari’s writings. Oddly, while Dosse’s summary of the essay follows its division into a series of ‘formal criteria of recognition’ of structuralism, it unaccountably omits the crucial seventh section, ‘Final Criteria: From the Subject to Practice’, which narrates an immanent passage of structuralism beyond itself. These are, Deleuze writes, ‘the criteria of the future’.

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machine, from which their collaboration took off—taken by Guattari from passing remarks in Lacan’s seminar of 1953–54—was not simply an antistructuralist theoretical device; it carried with it the hopes of a practice of permanent therapeutic and political revolution. Deleuze developed the idea of such a practice via Guattari; Guattari was its problematic embodiment, as well as co-author. ‘A militant political activist and a psychoanalyst just so happen to meet in the same person, and instead of each minding his own business, they ceaselessly communicate, interfere with one another, and get mixed up—each mistaking himself for the other.’ So begins Deleuze’s Preface to Guattari’s 1972 collection of essays Psychoanalyse et transversalité. This is certainly more surprising than the meeting of a philosopher and a psychoanalyst from which Dosse’s narrative sets out. It provided the motor of Guattari’s thought, and also of its philosophical effects in his joint authorship with Deleuze. It was Guattari’s political militancy that determined his institutional practice, ‘institutional psychotherapy’, which in turn raised a series of novel philosophical problems about subjectivity, desire and the social. Arguably, it was Deleuze’s distance from the sources of these problems—the screenwriter Alain Aptekman is quoted as claiming that Deleuze ‘couldn’t bear the sight of crazy people’—his philosophical appropriation of the ascetic virtues, that allowed him to elaborate them with the clarity and theoretical radicality that he did, transforming Guattari’s ‘designs or even diagrams’ into ‘concepts’. (The description is Deleuze’s own.). The working practice of the composition of Anti-Oedipus, between August 1969 and August 1971, was that Deleuze obliged Guattari to write each day, mailing him the results after four o’clock, for Deleuze to rework. They would then meet on Tuesday afternoons. This initial collaborative procedure has fed the myth of Guattari the idiot savant, which is far from the truth, although he did suffer from a kind of writer’s block. The intriguing tale of Guattari’s ‘psychopolitical itinerary, 1930–1964’ is essentially the story of his relations to successive forms of groups—political, psychotherapeutic, intellectual and ultimately politico-psychotherapeutic: from the French Communist Party to the Fourth International to the Left Opposition; back-and-forth between the institutional analysis of the psychiatric clinic, La Borde, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and on to his own creations, the Federation of Institutional Study Groups and Research (fgeri, 1965) and the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Training (cerfi, 1967). Philosophically, up to the point of the encounter with Deleuze, this was largely a journey from Sartre to Lacan, in which the concept of the group-subject was formed, transformed and experimentally tested. Guattari was notorious for continually forming and breaking up groups. The direct application of Lacanian ideas in radical political organizations

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had predictably unstable results. In cerfi, for example, we are told by one participant, in the name of the refusal of the separation of public and private lives and in line with the tenets of Lacanianism, ‘you had to take responsibility for your desire by asking for the salary that you thought you could justify’. Experimental practices of collective reflexivity—that is, endless meetings— took up much of the time and energy of these groups. If there is a discernible psycho-biographical narrative to Guattari’s life, it is that of a maternal fixation, the acknowledged fear of loving his mother, displaced and dispersed onto multiple objects, in a sexual practice at one time compulsorily generalized within the community at La Borde on the basis of an egalitarian political rationalization—leaving behind a string of emotional casualties. (At La Borde, Jean-Claude Polack is reported as taking on the selfappointed task of breaking up monogamous relationships lasting more than a week; before entering one himself and departing, with wife and child.) The goal was a radical equality of roles—‘psychologists doing the dishes’ and porters doing therapy—but the method was ‘militant centralism’, in Guattari’s self-description. Guattari’s charismatic authoritarianism in instituting these practices of radical equality is a recurrent theme of Dosse’s narrative. The attempt to abolish the division between mental and manual labour within a psychiatric institution, in the present, took a heavy toll on everyone, but had some dramatic therapeutic effects. It also had an important conceptual productivity. The concept of ‘transversality’, a term coined by Ginette Michaud, was the second theoretical innovation of Guattari’s early work, along with his notion of machine. It emerged in 1964 as an attempt to go beyond the opposition between ‘group-subjects’ and ‘subjected-groups’. Designed to replace the notion of ‘institutional transfer’—the institutional-therapeutic version of Freudian transference—and to designate the structure of a group unconscious, ‘transversality’ subsequently acquired a broader theoretical meaning, in its application to the relations between disciplinary practices. It structured the working methods of both fgeri and cerfi, with the latter providing something like an experimental model of transdisciplinarity in the humanities and social sciences. At its most successful, in the early 1970s, cerfi was awarded several substantial government research contracts, in the fields of urban planning, health and community development. By 1973 it had seventy-five full-time employees. (There is an interesting comparison to be made here with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.) It also enjoyed considerable publishing success. It was not uncommon for its journal, Recherches, to sell over 10,000 copies; the success of its books could be measured in the hundreds of thousands. The material on cerfi is some of the most interesting in Dosse’s book. A second psycho-biographical narrative implicit in Dosse’s material concerns Guattari’s clearly Oedipal relation to Lacan, which was broken

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only by the relationship with Deleuze. Lacan appears in the now-familiar guise of an abusive monster, behaving outrageously towards patients, as a part of a deliberate, thinly rationalized analytical strategy. Guattari appears as a complicit agent of Lacan’s mystique, making it a condition of working at La Borde for some monitors that they enter into analysis with Lacan. ‘On the weekly train from the clinic to Lacan’s seminar and to his couch, they practically filled an entire car.’ In Guattari’s case, we are told, Lacan would sometimes prolong the sessions (often only three or four minutes long) by allowing Guattari to drive him home, pronouncing ‘That’s part of the analysis.’ More destructively, learning during therapy that Barthes had asked Guattari to submit his paper ‘Machine and Structure’ to the journal Communications, Lacan insisted that he submit it instead to his own journal, Scilicet. Guattari withdrew it from Communications, only for Lacan to take it but never publish it. By this time, 1969, Lacan had turned to his Maoist son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, as his anointed successor, leaving Guattari, who had aspired to such a role, out in the cold. This seems to have been the condition for Guattari’s turn to Deleuze, some of whose categories from Difference and Repetition (1968) he had used in ‘Machine and Structure’. Deleuze’s own encounter with Lacan, while teaching in Lyon in 1967, prefigured his later meeting with the painter Francis Bacon. Deleuze greatly admired the work of both men, but the meetings are studies in passiveaggressive deadlock. In Lyon, Deleuze invited Lacan for a cocktail at his home. On arrival, Lacan refused all alcohol. Ten minutes later, he said he wanted to rest and was taken back to his hotel. At dinner, ‘Lacan ordered a bottle of vodka and downed half of it.’ Deleuze flattered him, declaring his visit to Lyon a great day. ‘After a moment, Lacan answered churlishly, saying something rather enigmatic: “not like that”. So Deleuze didn’t say another word.’ After the lecture, Lacan then announced that he wanted to end the evening at Deleuze’s house, where he ‘launched into paranoid recriminations against everyone wanting to steal his ideas’. Compare the meeting with Bacon, fourteen years later, shortly after the publication of Deleuze’s 1981 book, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. ‘What was supposed to be a great meeting’, Dosse recounts, ‘turned into a disaster’. Joachim Vital, Deleuze’s editor, who had arranged the meeting, described it as follows: The meal was awful, as awful as their discussion . . . They smiled at each other, complimented each other, and smiled again. We were flabbergasted by their platitudes. We tried to salvage the discussion, mentioning [numerous artistic references] . . . [But] each one tried to take the ball and run with it alone, ignoring the other one.

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There is no reason that philosophers and artists should have much to say to one another, just because they admire each other’s work; especially such men of the 1950s as these two. But this goes deeper, I think. The image of rivalrous—even sadistic—self-sufficiency is apposite. Afterwards, describing the meeting, Deleuze’s compliment is distinctly aggressive: ‘You can feel his power and violence’, he wrote of Bacon, ‘but he’s also quite charming. After sitting for an hour, he starts twisting in all directions, like real bacon.’ An unconscious desire to reduce the artist to a figure in one of his own paintings—desubjectified sensation, a piece of meat—cannot be disguised. In this case, of course, the underhand rivalry is predictable precisely because of the depth of Deleuze’s philosophical identification with Bacon’s practice. For Deleuze, Bacon had become the vehicle of actualization for his late Nietzschean conception of art as the domain of ‘forces’, ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’. In this respect, Deleuze was in direct competition with Bacon over Bacon’s art. And perhaps Bacon knew, at least inchoately, that it was in his interest to let the philosopher think that he owned it. After all, Bacon owed a great deal to Deleuze with respect to the surprising, hyperbolic growth of his reputation from the 1980s onwards, in France in particular. In fact, in the growing identification of Deleuze’s philosophy with Bacon’s art, there is a kind of ironic revenge of Bacon upon Deleuze for appropriating his painting. In identifying itself with Bacon’s practice, Deleuze’s philosophy gives the lie to the idea that it is a ‘contemporary philosophy’ in any sense analogous to the expression ‘contemporary art’. Its Nietzschean claim to the new—so central to its philosophical and cultural self-image—is cast into fundamental doubt. In the meantime, Deleuze had left Lyon to take up a position at the new experimental university at Vincennes, the University of Paris 8, the establishment of which, in autumn 1969, was a more-or-less direct outcome of the student activism of May 68. Deleuze played no part in the protests, spending the summer at the family property in Limousin working on his doctoral thesis, where he was diagnosed with the return of his tuberculosis, which would lead to him losing a lung early the next year. He was convalescing when he first met Guattari. Deleuze took up a post in the Philosophy Department at Vincennes in autumn 1970. Foucault was Head of Department and had recruited followers of Althusser and Lacan, including Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and François Regnault, one of the editors of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Dosse’s account of the early years of this Maoist department, in which ‘making sure that theoretical Marxism-Leninism dominated among the student masses’ was the official departmental policy, is mind-boggling. And it was not just the students who were under political surveillance. ‘Alain Badiou and Judith Miller even created a course together just to monitor the political content of other classes in

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the philosophy department.’ Deleuze was a particular target of the ‘brigade’, which throws an interesting light on the Preface to Badiou’s later, self-serving book on Deleuze, published after his death. The department at Vincennes appears in many ways as a more extreme multi-disciplinary philosophical equivalent to Guattari’s experiments in group-analysis—authoritarian and radically libertarian in equal measure—and in permanent crisis (which is not quite the same thing as permanent revolution, of course). Deleuze appears to have loved it. The university moved to Saint-Denis in 1978, and Deleuze stayed there until his retirement in 1987. In the midst of all this, Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980)—from which Rhizome (1976) was published first as a separate book—and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975). These were spectacularly successful, highly original, theoretical works that pursue the question of the place and functioning of desire within the social, raised by the movements of May 68, in radical new directions, both philosophically and politically, to the point of at once founding and exhausting their own genre. If it is true that, as Deleuze and Guattari went on to argue in What is Philosophy? (1991), philosophy is ‘the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts’, then these are pre-eminently philosophical texts. The string of concepts constructed in Anti-Oedipus is dazzling: from the ‘desiring-production’ and ‘body without organs’ of the ‘desiring-machines’ in Part One; through the fundamental critique of the Oedipal mystification and the ‘familialism’ of psychoanalysis, and ‘deterritorialization’, in Part Two: via the problem of the socius as the coding of the flows of desire in Part Three, incorporating both a new, stagist, ethnological history of state forms and a semiotic account of value and the money-form; to ‘schizoanalysis’, ‘the molecular unconscious’ and ‘the molar’ in Part Four. The freeing of the concept of desire from its basis in lack and its restriction to the individual psyche, and the opening up of the problematic of the libidinal investment of the social field, are fundamental philosophical—yet also transdisciplinary—moves. They redistribute the purportedly philosophical object domain across the field of the social as a whole. Similarly, but theoretically more radical still—albeit problematically— the more avowedly pragmatist A Thousand Plateaus is a serial montage of wildly diverse, singular concept-constructions: from the famous ‘rhizome’ (anti-dialectical equivalent of the negative-dialectical ‘constellation’), via ‘segmentarity’, ‘the abstract machine’, ‘faciality’, the different forms of ‘becoming’, ‘the minoritarian’, ‘the refrain’ and the ‘war machine’ to the ‘smooth and striated spaces’ so loved by the recent architectural avantgarde. As Brian Massumi’s translator’s Foreword put it: ‘The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?’ Work for what, though? The circuit of

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truth and practice is not so easily broken as the wishful devotees would have it. Much like Rhizome, the Kafka book is an outtake, elaborating a particular concept, ‘the minor’, out of a particular context—Kafka’s writings—in multiple relations to other purported conceptual singularities: ‘connectors’, ‘assemblage’/ agencement. In many ways, these books remain to be adequately received, despite the millions of words of introductory summaries and secondary exposition to which they have been subjected by the middle tier of an academic publishing industry that is tending increasingly towards its ‘real subsumption’ to capital via authorial branding. That is, they have yet to become the enabling conditions of theoretically significant new productions. There is no post-Deleuze-and-Guattarianism, in the way that there are thriving fields of post-Foucauldian study, for example. There is, largely, simply fetishistic terminological repetition. One reason for this—apart from the degeneration of the conditions of reception and production—is the continuing obscurity of Guattari’s own work. Dosse’s chapters on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus make no attempt at philosophical readings of these texts, in contrast to the dull but accurate précis of Deleuze’s books. However, largely thanks to Virginie Linhart’s interviews, Intersecting Lives does offer us enough of an intellectual sketch of Guattari to indicate how much more we need to know about his thought, the theoretical dynamics of which (like all thought) transcend the historical conditions of their production. Perhaps people should stop looking for some mystical ‘Delari’—authorial unity of Deleuze and Deleuze-and-Guattari—and start looking for what the illustrator Gérard Lauzier dubbed ‘Guattareuze’.

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Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention Allen Lane: London and New York 2011, £30, hardback 592 pp, 978 0 713 99895 5

Tariq Ali

LEAVING SHABAZZ The rich repertoire of songs and music that African-Americans have produced over the last century has to a large extent been recorded. Its value is recognized all over the world. The same cannot be said for black oratory, which shared the same roots and reflected similar emotions: slavery, segregation and imprisonment produced resistance, anger, bitterness and, often, resignation. Very few speeches were written, leave alone recorded, until the mid-20th century; and yet they had a huge cultural and historical impact. W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey were amongst the greatest orators during the early twentieth century. A generation later, Adam Clayton Powell, the independent Congressman elected from Harlem, could electrify an audience. This is the tradition within which the 1960s activist Malcolm X should be situated. It was his ability to articulate political ideas instinctively that won him an audience far beyond the ranks of the converted. First and foremost, he was one of the greatest orators that North America has ever produced. Malcolm X embodied all the strengths and many of the contradictions of the black political condition in mid 20th-century America. Towards the end of his tragically short life he understood, better than most, that it was structural and systemic barriers that had kept the majority of African-Americans below the poverty line and denied them political and racial equality, a hundred years after a civil war supposedly fought to liberate their ancestors from slavery. In a speech of April 1964, he pointed out that if Lincoln— sardonically: ‘that great shining liberal’—had freed the Afro-American, ‘we wouldn’t need civil-rights legislation today’. Malcolm X’s political philosophy and approach, as well as his religious beliefs, were in transition over the last five years of a life cut short, in February 1965, by assassins from the Nation

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of Islam. They had acted on the orders of their Prophet and the National Secretary who was, in all likelihood, an fbi plant. Manning Marable’s new, deconstructive biography demonstrates all this in vivid detail. Marable, a social-democratic essayist and historian who died in April this year, a few days before the book was published, was a muchrespected voice within the African-American intelligentsia and later within the academy as a whole. In his earlier books and essays on black liberation, especially in the sharply analytical How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983), he deployed many a weapon from the Marxist armoury. The tone is somewhat different in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. ‘From an early age’, Marable writes, ‘Malcolm Little had constructed multiple masks that distanced his inner self from the outside world . . . He acquired the subtle tools of an ethnographer, crafting his language to fit the cultural contexts of his diverse audiences’. Noting the various identities he adopted during his lifetime—from Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—Marable asserts that ‘no single personality ever captured him fully. In this sense his narrative is a brilliant series of reinventions, “Malcolm X” being just the best known.’ Marable is not, of course, the first to chronicle the life of Malcolm X. The latter’s autobiography, co-written with Alex Haley, came out in late 1965, only months after its subject’s death. Since then there have been half a dozen biographies, not to mention a film by Spike Lee. But Marable’s is the first account to benefit from access to the personal correspondence, photo­ graphs and texts of speeches held by Malcolm X’s estate. Marable worked on the book for almost two decades, and was only able to complete it, as he generously acknowledges, with help from his partner Leith Mullings, a scholar in anthropology; a project manager, coincidentally a Muslim; and a team of dedicated researchers and post-graduate students at Columbia. The end product is sprawling and under-edited, but much of the information it collates has not previously appeared in book form. Some of it is, frankly, extraneous; but some of it sheds new light on the killing as well as providing details of Malcolm’s personal life that he carefully omitted from his own autobiography, and which were also absent from Lee’s movie based on that work. The basic facts of Malcolm’s life are by now well known. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska in May 1925, but spent most of his childhood in Lansing, Michigan. At the age of six he lost his father, Earl Little Sr—killed in a streetcar accident that many at the time found suspicious, and which Marable suggests may have been the work of local white supremacists. Malcolm’s mixed-race Grenadian mother struggled to feed and clothe her seven children; in 1939, she had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent the next quarter-century. Malcolm and his siblings were forced to depend on each other. In 1941, after being expelled

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from school, he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister. He spent the war years shuttling between Boston and Harlem, alternating between a series of menial jobs and a zoot-suited life peddling drugs, thieving and pimping. Unsurprisingly, he ended up in prison, receiving an eight-year sentence for a string of burglaries. He spent the years from 1946 to 52 in the Massachusetts penal system. It was here, in 1948, that he discovered the true faith as espoused by a politico-religious sect, the Nation of Islam. This changed his life-style in many ways: it meant farewell to pork and alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. Moreover, as Marable explains, the Nation of Islam ‘required converts to reject their slave surnames, replacing them with the letter X’. An autodidact, Malcolm acquired the reading habit in prison and it never left him. His choices were eclectic: the Koran became an important reference point, but he also dipped into Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, as well as the history of his people and of the Africa whence they had originally come. It would be wrong, however, to assume that his road to politics started in prison. In later years he recalled snatches of conversation he had overheard at home, and when he accompanied his father to political gatherings. Earl Little Sr was born in Georgia in 1890; memories of the Civil War, and of what had been promised but never given, remained strong in African-American communities in the South. Moreover, as Marable points out, the 1920s and 30s were a period of resurgence for white supremacism. Originally consisting of little more than violent gangs of embittered vigilantes, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn after the First World War amid rising unemployment and waves of xenophobia directed against not only blacks but also ‘non-European’ immigrants, Catholics, Jews, anarchists and communists. By 1923 the re-invented Klan had a membership of at least two and a half million, with millions more sympathizers and a base in both Republican and Democratic Parties. Many black citizens, observing these developments with trepidation, were drawn to black separatist and nationalist movements. Others preferred to work with the gradualist National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), a staunchly integrationist organization led by the conservative Booker T. Washington. Offered these choices, Earl Little Sr opted for separatism, joining Marcus Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ movement. Garvey, a Jamaican, had migrated to the United States, witnessed the racism and the Jim Crow laws and decided to fight back by creating the Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia) and the African Communities League. He espoused an inventive theology, and proclaimed himself provisional president of Africa, bestowing ludicrous titles on his acolytes: Dukes of Uganda, Knights of the Nile and so on. According to Marable, central to Garvey’s success was his ‘enthusiastic embrace of capitalism’ and free enterprise. The problem was that material success had been reserved for whites, which was why black Americans should ‘return’ to their own continent and

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So deep was the sense of wrong and humiliation among the Negroes and so high did he lift them up that they gave him all that they did, year after year, expecting Garvey to perform some miracle. No revolution is ever made except when the masses have reached this pitch of exaltation, when they see a vision of a new society. That is what Garvey gave them.

James stressed Garvey’s qualities as a speaker, judging him ‘one of the great orators of his time’: ‘ill-educated, but with the rhythms of Shakespeare and the Bible in his head, he was a master of rhetoric and invective, capable of great emotional appeals and dramatic intensity.’ James continued: Every two-cent revolutionary who has talked to Negroes in cafeterias and therefore knows the Negro question points out Garvey’s errors and absurdities and thinks that thereby a contribution has been made to knowledge. More than in all the theses of the Comintern, a basis for the building of a real mass movement among the Negroes lies in a thorough study of this first great eruption of the Negro people.

With the collapse of Garveyism, many within the movement changed tack. Some became labour organizers, socialists and communists. Others shifted to the naacp, which had itself moved in a more radical direction since Washington’s death. The more religious amongst Garvey’s followers drifted towards the Muslim sects that were becoming active in the country and winning recruits by arguing that Christianity was the religion of

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create their version of the white American dream; to facilitate the process, Garvey created a shipping company, Black Star Line. On the political front he held that, since the kkk was the ‘invisible government of the United States’ and represented the real views of ‘white America’, the unia should open direct negotiations with them—after all, both were opposed to social and sexual intercourse between blacks and whites (a tradition that would be continued by the Nation of Islam). The summit between Garvey and Grand Wizard Clarke enraged some of his own supporters, many of whom left the organization. Garvey’s security apparatchiks tracked down and killed the leader of the dissidents. Malcolm’s parents, who had met through Garveyist circles in Montreal, remained loyal, moving from Omaha to Milwaukee and then Lansing to organize unia chapters. They suffered for their activism: in 1929, when Malcolm was four, the family house was firebombed. The fire department refused to come to their aid and the house was burnt to the ground. By this time Garveyism was in decline: in 1927 its leader had left the States not for Africa but Jamaica, before later moving to Britain, where he died in 1940. In his obituary C. L. R. James, who loathed Garvey’s politics, sought to explain his appeal to the black masses:

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slave-owners. The fact that most of the churches were segregated underscored their message. When Malcolm first encountered the Nation of Islam in prison, then, much of what he discovered was familiar territory. The theology was, however, even more inventive than Garvey’s. Marable’s account of the Muslim sects and their impact on the African-American community is the most comprehensive to date, allotted almost 250 pages here. The history of the Nation of Islam, so vital to the formation of Malcolm, can be summarized as follows. The inspirer of the movement was an eccentric fantasist named Wallace D. Fard—he later added Muhammad to his name—who revealed himself to audiences as a prophet in the late 1920s. The founding myth he supplied for the cult is risible, but deadly serious in its purpose: to encourage black pride. In the ‘Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam’ and other texts, Fard asserted that African-Americans belonged to the ‘lost tribe of Shabazz’, which had been sold into slavery by Meccan traders in the seventeenth century. They should therefore ‘recover’ their original Muslim religion, learn Arabic and so on. The white race, meanwhile, were ‘devils’, the product of a chemical experiment conducted by the imaginary Shabazz scientist Yacub. Centuries ago these white devils escaped Yacub’s control and conquered the world; the ‘Asiatic’ blacks had gone into a deep sleep, but the Nation of Islam would awaken them and restore their pride. The fact that such tales could be taken at all seriously by intelligent human beings underlines the desperate straits in which African-Americans found themselves at the time. In August 1931 Fard gave a lecture in Detroit. Attending it was Elijah Poole, a brick-kiln labourer from Georgia. Mesmerized by the preacher’s performance, Poole went up to him and expressed his appreciation: ‘I know who you are, you’re God himself.’ ‘That’s right,’ was the modest response, ‘but don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.’ This was the real founding moment of the Nation of Islam. After Fard mysteriously disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad became his Prophet, and after a few inevitable splits found himself the unchallenged leader of the sect. After his release from prison, Malcolm’s dynamism and natural gifts as an orator propelled him rapidly to the top of the organization; within a year, he had his own ministry in Harlem. He became Elijah’s leading lieutenant and was widely viewed as his successor. Malcolm’s organizational skills matched his oratory, and the Nation of Islam expanded from a small sect to a proper movement with branches in most of the major cities. In 1947, according to Marable, it had no more than 400 members, and less than 1,000 in 1953; but it could claim 6,000 adherents by the mid-50s, and by 1961, in a huge leap, as many as 75,000. However, it could never match the naacp, which by 1939 had grown to a mass organization with a quarter of a million members; by 1943 it had half a million, and double that by 1947, when the

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The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master’s second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table . . . When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with the master, he’d say, ‘What’s the matter, boss, we sick?’ . . . The house Negro was in a minority. The field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

As Marable points out, this was an important speech in many respects, marking a public break with the nonsense of the lost tribe of Shabazz and the Arab origins of African-Americans. The Negro, Malcolm now asserted, was an African, pure and simple. This speech laid the basis for the pan-Africanism that was to become more and more prominent over the remaining years of his life. He was turning away from the Nation of Islam, yet still he remained loyal to Elijah, even though the latter’s sycophants fumed at the liberties Malcolm was permitted. The Kennedy assassination was the occasion of the first public breach. At a public meeting in New York, Malcolm spoke of the killings the us administration had organized, including those of its own allies in South Vietnam. Kennedy’s shooting, he explained to a cheering audience, was ‘the chickens coming home to roost’, adding: ‘Being an old

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black population as a whole numbered 15 million. This growth reflected the social ferment of a period that witnessed the largest working-class mobilizations in us history. The rise of the Nation of Islam, by contrast, took place during the 1950s—a period of affluence, near full-employment but also of defeat for African-Americans, who remained socially and politically deprived. A conservative white-separatist political order created the conditions for a conservative black separatism from below. Like Garvey before him, Elijah Mohammed encouraged black capitalism to create a black commercial realm, and also, of course, profits for his organization and his family. As he grew and travelled, Malcolm’s views began to change. Harlem was the most cosmopolitan of America’s black enclaves, and people there were deeply sceptical of the mumbo-jumbo that constituted the Nation of Islam’s explanation of the world. Increasingly embarrassed about it himself, Malcolm became aware that Islam itself is a universalist religion; any version of it that excluded anybody on the basis of colour existed only in the fevered imaginations of Nation of Islam converts. Malcolm was developing his own explanations for divisions within the African-American community; these appealed to the poor, who were tired of seeing their more traditional leaders kow-tow to the White House. In January 1963, he made a devastating speech to over a thousand students at Michigan State University in which he drew a distinction between ‘the house Negro and the field Negro’:

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farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They’ve always made me glad.’ At Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago, Elijah and John Ali, the fbi plant who was the National Secretary, issued a public retraction, expressed their grief and shock at Kennedy’s death, and temporarily suspended Malcolm from the organization. He would never be let back in. While angered by the suspension, he must also have been relieved: he was finding it difficult to justify Nation of Islam policies while debating other militant black leaders. It was one thing to denounce open collaborationists as Uncle Toms, but the Nation of Islam’s refusal to participate in the civil-rights movement and its denunciations of Martin Luther King and other activists were indefensible. In March 1964, Malcolm announced his break with the Nation of Islam, and his intention to set up his own organization. In fact, he set up two: Muslim Mosque Inc.—a direct alternative to the Nation of Islam—and then, in June, a second body with a wider remit called the Organization of AfroAmerican Unity. The choice of name for the latter was clearly influenced by the month-long trip to Africa and the Middle East Malcolm had made that spring. In April he had completed the hajj; according to Marable, the egalitarianism among pilgrims of all colours brought an ‘epiphany’, suggesting black separatism was not the only solution to the problems of race. What Malcolm had witnessed in Africa, meanwhile, gave more substance to his changing political views. Soon after his return, he gave a speech drawing parallels between European colonial rule and institutionalized racism in the us: the police in Harlem were like the French in Algeria, ‘like an occupying army’. As Marable notes, ‘for the first time he publicly made the connection between racial oppression and capitalism’. African-Americans should, he said, emulate the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, also observing that ‘all of the countries that are emerging today from under colonialism are turning towards socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident.’ Malcolm made a second, longer African trip from July to November 1964, visiting a string of countries where he met a range of intellectuals and political figures. In Egypt, he spoke at the oau conference and talked with Nasser; in Ghana, he met Shirley DuBois and Maya Angelou; in Tanzania, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and Julius Nyerere; in Kenya, Oginga Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta. The international dimension was crucial to his thinking in the final months. In mid-December, he invited Che Guevara—in New York for the celebrated un General Assembly speech—to address an oaau rally; Guevara did not attend, but sent a message of solidarity. ‘We’re living in a revolutionary world and in a revolutionary age’, Malcolm told the audience. He continued:

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The fact that many of the initial recruits to the oaau had come from the Nation of Islam was used by Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm’s numerous enemies within the Nation of Islam to depict him as a ‘traitor’. They decided to execute him, as he knew they would. In December 1964 he came to speak at Oxford. Afterwards, I walked him back to the Randolph Hotel, where we sat and spoke for over an hour. On parting I expressed the hope that we would meet again. He shook his head: ‘I don’t think we will.’ Why? ‘I think they’ll kill me very soon’, he said calmly. ‘Who will kill you?’ Here he had no doubts: it would be the Nation of Islam or the fbi, or both together. He explained how his break with separatism and moves to build alliances with progressive white groups made him a dangerous figure. In February 1965, three assassins from the Nation of Islam gunned him down at an oaau meeting in New York. Three years later, Martin Luther King, too, was killed soon after he broke with the Democrats and decided to stand as an independent Presidential candidate. And in the years that followed the fbi systematically organized the assassinations of Black Panther leaders and activists. The strength of Marable’s account is the huge amount of information he provides. Everything is in here, but it comes at a cost, often disrupting the narrative. Details of Malcolm’s personal life—his unhappy marriage, his male lovers in prison—crowd what is essentially a political biography. The emphasis on the Nation of Islam is not totally misplaced, but it is accorded far too much space, at the expense of any discussion of the overall social and political contexts, both us and global, within which Malcolm operated. The result is seriously unbalanced: the events that shaped his continuing intellectual evolution—the killing of Lumumba and the ensuing crisis in Congo; the Vietnam War; the rise of a new generation of black and white activists in the us, of which Marable was one—are mentioned only in passing. This is a great pity, because in historical terms their significance far outweighs that of the audience sizes of various Nation of Islam meetings or the sectarian infighting which Marable discusses at length. Marable also makes some nonsensical comparisons between the Nation of Islam and Shia Muslims as well as other clumsy references to Islam that it might have been better to exclude. Conversely, the book might have benefited from a comparative survey of the different sects, black and white, that proliferated in the us in the interwar years; the Nation of Islam were not the only game in town—Mormons,

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I, for one, would like to impress, especially upon those who call themselves leaders, the importance of realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world. As long as we think—as one of my good brothers mentioned out of the side of his mouth here a couple of Sundays ago—that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.

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Scientologists, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses all gained large followings at the time, and remain influential now. In an Epilogue, Marable sums up Malcolm’s legacy, seeking to counter ‘revisionist’ ideas that in his final years he had been ‘evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer’. Correctly he argues that Malcolm would have had nothing to do with affirmative action—what he sought was ‘a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States’. He always demanded that middle-class blacks be accountable to the masses of poor and working-class African Americans. Marable contrasts the posthumous fates of Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr: the latter sanctified by the political establishment as a martyr to a ‘colour-blind America’, celebrated by an official annual holiday, while Malcolm was pilloried and stereotyped by the mass media, albeit as ‘an icon of black encouragement’ to African American youth. Marable then tries to elide King with Obama, differentiating Malcolm from both of them. This is both sad and grotesque. King was killed for his opposition to the Vietnam War. He never turned his back on the plight of African-Americans. The reason why he broke from the Democratic Party was to unite blacks and whites against war and for social justice. Obama’s record speaks for itself. Malcolm would have lambasted him for escalating the war in Afghanistan and extending it to Pakistan, where thousands of civilians have been killed by ‘targeted’ drone attacks. He would have pilloried Obama’s role as Wall Street’s handmaiden, even as working-class America, black and white, suffers from rising levels of unemployment and social deprivation. His words at Michigan State University in 1963 are all too applicable today, as many are coming to realize. Marable suggests that Obama’s election means that Malcolm’s vision would have to be ‘radically redefined’, for a political environment that appears to be ‘post-racial’. In that case, Malcolm might have asked, why is it that in 2011 the number of African-Americans incarcerated in us prisons is the same as the slave population in 1860? And why, despite the ascent of such figures as Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Obama, do blacks remain on the lowest rung of the social ladder? Malcolm was not such a prisoner of the American dream as to think that getting a dark-skinned man in the White House need necessarily do anything to change the fundamental structures of wealth, race and power.